


Before It Falls

by mnwood



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Canon Rewrite, Eventual Happy Ending, Fatherhood, Gen, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, POV Dean Winchester, Slow Build Castiel/Dean Winchester, Slow Burn, Soft Dean Winchester
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-30
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 15:28:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 26,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29012805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mnwood/pseuds/mnwood
Summary: Castiel is in love with Dean. Dean doesn't know it but he can feel, whenever he's with Cas, that there is something teetering on the edge of a cliff, and he has to figure out what it is before it falls.Starting in season 11, a canon rewrite fic.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 43
Kudos: 60





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Edit 3/7/21 - The more I write of this fic, the more plot-heavy it is. I may end up splitting it into "books" to keep it neatly organized, as it's likely going to be fairly long. I've been updating weekly, on Sundays, but that may change at some point. Feel free to ask me any questions or anything over at [my tumblr!](https://deancasheadcanons.tumblr.com/)

The first time Castiel remembers feeling anything was during the apocalypse, when he voiced his concerns to Anna and grappled with the idea of disobedience. 

He knows he felt things before, had his mind wiped of any acts of defiance or displays of emotions, and it is disconcerting to think that this has been done to him hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of times over his long life. But his life has never felt linear, in any case. 

Most of it has been spent in heaven, he thinks, with the first few millennia devoted only to general revelation, to learning and understanding the universe in a way that made him want to worship whoever or whatever created it or started it. He was told this was God, this was creation, and if he had any doubts back then, they were erased. 

He was part of a garrison, then he had his own garrison, or maybe it was the other way around. There was order to maintain in heaven among heavenly beings and human souls, and sometimes he was a soldier and other times he was just a being, so vast and limitless that his only purpose was to exist. 

The few times he’s been sent to earth are his most concrete memories, likely because he was confined to a human body and bound by the straight line of earthly time. Even so, he is almost certain that those memories have been altered. He feels sure that if he rebelled for a human once, then he has done it before. He’s too old not to have.

However, he doesn’t believe he’s ever been human.

So when it did happen in the human year of 2013, he could feel immediately that his grace was gone and that the body he inhabited was the whole of who he was. He had headaches most of the time, and he figured it was due to the human brain not being able to process the thousands of years of information Castiel knew. His body ached and itched and jerked of its own accord, and he could no longer stand in one spot unmoving for hours not just because his body wouldn’t physically let him but because he would get antsy and bored after just a few minutes. 

Being human felt bad. 

Castiel spent the first few days sorting through the basic feelings of hunger, thirst, arousal, needing to relieve himself, needing sleep, etcetera. More complex feelings, like sadness, happiness, contentment, anger, would come to him over several days of hardship. He found that these emotions were similar to how he felt when he was an angel, but he experienced them so much more intensely as a human, on such a visceral level because he had nowhere to put them. If he was sad as an angel, he could make that sadness into a wave of light or a ball of matter and put that sadness on another plane, in another dimension even, but as a human the only place his sadness could go was inside him and out through his tear ducts.

He had been human for a week before he saw Dean in person. 

And it wasn’t until he saw him, and felt his hand on his arm, and looked up into his eyes, that he realized that the love he had learned during the apocalypse, the reason why he rebelled in the first place, the first real emotion he remembers ever feeling, that this love had grown big, bigger than his grace, bigger than his true form, and it had spread so completely through every plane of existence and every dimension of time and space Castiel knew, and now, here it was. It was such a simple thing. It existed fully in the beating of his heart. And for the first time, he understood it in its entirety. 

He loves Dean Winchester.  
  


* * *

Dean sits up on the side of his bed with a yawn, wiping sleep from his eyes and squeezing his right hand open and shut. He looks down at the inside of his forearm and rubs his left hand across it. He feels lighter without the Mark. 

There’s a knock on his door, and Sam opens it without waiting for a response. His face is pinched in concern as he comes into the room, one arm holding a crying baby against his shoulder.

Dean huffs a laugh as he reaches his hands out to take the baby. He holds her against his chest and rubs her back, and she nuzzles her face into his shirt and balls her hands into fists.

“Couldn’t even make it one night, huh?” Dean teases. “I really don’t mind if she stays in here with me.”

“No, you’ve got—it’s my fault she’s here, I should…” Sam shakes his head and shrugs.

“No offense, Sammy, but you don’t know shit about kids. Especially babies.”

“Hey, that’s not—OK, maybe, yeah, sure.” Sam looks at the baby then back at the door then back at the baby. “So, what should I do? Should I get the formula?”

Dean stands, rubs his cheek against the top of the baby’s head, then heads out into the hallway with her. “Yeah, I’ll feed her and then she’ll probably want to go back to sleep,” he says as he walks.

The three of them sit in silence while Dean feeds the baby. He doesn’t want to talk about it. The way she’s only maybe a few days old and can already sit up on his knee and hold the bottle herself with only his hand wrapped around her back for support. The miniature Mark of Cain on her left shoulder. 

Just as Dean suspected, Amara falls back asleep immediately after he burps her. Sam tries to offer to take her again, but Dean hugs her to his chest and walks back to his own room with her. It’s been a long time since he’s held a child, since he’s cradled something so small and innocent in his hands and felt the assurance of duty, of knowing that all he has to do is take care of her, his only purpose keeping her alive. He’s spent the past year feeling so tense, on edge, holding rage in every line of his body, that now he craves how easy and simple it is to be gentle and careful. Unburdened by the need to kill, he cherishes the need to nest.

Dean is drifting off, Amara a solid weight against his chest, when his phone rings. 

“Cas?” Dean whispers.

“Dean. You’re OK,” Cas replies breathlessly. 

“Yeah. I’m alright. What’s, uh, what about you? Where are you?”

“Dean, I—it’s good to hear your voice,” Cas says. “I can’t come to you. Rowena, she—it’s a spell, it’s not safe to be around me right now. Dean, the Mark, is it—”

“It’s gone, Cas.”

Cas takes a long time to answer. “I’m sorry. For going behind your back, for Charlie, for...for everything. But I’m not sorry that we succeeded. I’m not sorry for that.”

Dean’s heart constricts at the mention of Charlie; Amara shifts and fusses against his chest. He says, “After what I—you’re apologizing to _me?_ No, Cas, I’m the one who—”

“It was the Mark. It gave you abilities that I was unprepared to handle, and I—well, I believed I could get through to you.” He sighs. “The important thing is that it’s gone.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean rubs a circle into Amara’s back. “If you can get here, that would be great. We need you, buddy, so we’ll just deal with whatever Rowena did to you.”

Dean doesn’t wait for Cas’ protests. He gives a curt goodbye and hangs up, setting his phone on the nightstand and settling back in for a nap. He feels worry building in his shoulders as he wonders what could be wrong with Cas, but the bone-deep exhaustion of losing the Mark wins out, so he falls asleep within a few minutes.

There was no telling how much time had actually passed between when the Darkness descended upon Sam and Dean in a cloud of smoke and when they woke up, disoriented, and soon discovered the disease that was ravaging the closest town. Once they realized they weren’t saving anybody other than the baby, they became singularly focused on getting her out of there and heading back to the bunker. They didn’t notice the Mark until they were home.

Amara wakes Dean up with a small cry. Impossibly, she feels heavier against his chest. He tells himself he’s imagining things, but then while he changes her diaper he sees that her onesie no longer fits right. 

“OK, sweet little abomination, we’re just gonna wait ‘til you’re grown up before we decide what to do, hm?” Dean says in a soothing voice. He leaves the onesie unbuttoned at the bottom and puts a pair of pants on her, then he reflexively kisses her forehead as he picks her up. 

Sam is in the kitchen, his back to Dean, shoulders slumped, seemingly staring at the coffeemaker. 

“Uh, earth to Sam?” Dean asks. He holds Amara on his hip with one hand as he fixes her formula with his other. “I talked to Cas. Apparently Rowena did something to him. We need him here, though, because god knows we can’t hunt if we’re taking care of a damn baby.”

Sam turns to Dean then, blinking himself back to reality. “What? Wait—you can’t put Cas on baby duty just so we can hunt, dude. Didn’t you have to rescue him from a babysitting gig once, when he was human?”

Dean squints at Sam and looks him up and down. “What happened in here five seconds before I walked in?”

“What?”

Dean sits at the table and hands Amara the bottle. “Something’s up with you. Talk to me.”

“It’s nothing.” Sam very slowly pours himself a cup of coffee. “OK, it’s not nothing.” He takes a drink. “We don’t have warding against reapers I guess.” 

“What?” 

“Her name’s Billie. She just—she showed up right here and said Death is ‘out of the picture,’ so the next time we die will be it. No more coming back. She said we’d be thrown into a place called the Empty.”

Dean sighs. “Awesome.” After a moment, he puts Amara up on his shoulder to burp her, then he asks, “Why’d she come to _you?_ I mean, I’m the one who couldn’t do what Death wanted me to.”

Sam looks away, his eyes shifting. “I don’t know.”

Dean lets the lie hang in the air for a bit. Wordlessly, he hands Amara off to Sam. As he leaves the kitchen, he says over his shoulder, “I’m gonna clean the library.”

He never asked what Sam and Cas did with the bodies after he murdered the Stynes. He never asked how much grace Cas burned through to heal himself after Dean beat him to a pulp. 

He works in silence, no music or anything, as he meticulously reorganizes all his stuff and puts everything back in its proper place. He scrubs the floor and the walls and throws out pieces of broken furniture, then he goes over the entire room one more time, working until his arms are sore and his hands are red and raw, in an attempt to erase all traces of the destruction he caused. The image of Cas’ bruised and bloodied face sears behind his eyes, and no matter how shiny the surfaces are, he can’t undo what he did to his best friend.

Hours have passed by the time he’s done. He momentarily panics, wondering why he hasn’t heard Sam or Amara at all, but then he goes to the empty bedroom they designated as Amara’s nursery and finds her asleep in the Pack ‘N Play they bought when they were driving home with nothing but a newborn baby and a car seat from the hospital and realized they would need to make a stop at the first Walmart they passed. 

“Sam?” Dean asks once he’s left Amara’s room and is walking down the hall toward Sam’s closed bedroom door.

Sam doesn’t answer, but something crashes and then pops loudly from his room, so Dean instinctively pulls the gun from his waistband and nearly breaks down the door to reveal his little brother, face twisted in grim determination and pain, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall and a bright orange flame licking up his neck, unnatural veins in his skin burning like ashes in a fire. 

“Sam!” Dean whisper-yells, thinking about the sleeping baby even as he watches Sam’s skin sizzle and then heal over. He drops to his knees and places the gun on the floor next to him. 

Sam blinks himself back to normal right as Dean cups his face in his hands. 

“Sammy, what the fuck? Are you OK?”

Sam nods then grips Dean’s wrist, gently tugging it away from his face. “Holy oil. We could’ve saved all those people with holy oil.”

Dean sits back on his heels, putting some distance between them. “You were infected. You’ve been infected this whole time, and you didn’t say anything.”

“I figured it out, alright? I knew I’d figure it out. Just wish I’d thought of it when we were in that hospital. I’m sure we’ll see that infection again, so we’ll have to—we need to try to track it and get holy oil to the affected people as soon as po—”

“Damn it, Sammy, you could’ve fucking told me. What if you had—you could’ve died.”

“Yeah, well.” Sam sighs and runs a hand through his hair. “I didn’t, and I’m better now, and we can help other people, so it’s really not a big deal.”

“That’s why Billie came to you, isn’t it? She came to reap you.”

“Maybe.”

Dean shakes his head, then rolls his eyes and groans as he hoists himself up from the floor. He puts his gun back in his waistband and tells Sam that he’s going to make sandwiches for lunch.

They don’t talk about it for the rest of the day. They’re preoccupied with Amara during lunch, and Dean keeps texting Cas and obsessively checking his phone for a response that never comes, and then Dean realizes that the sandwiches are the first real meal he’s had since losing the Mark, and he vomits an hour after eating. It’s not a big deal, so he doesn’t mention it to Sam.

That night, Dean retires to his room after getting Amara down and calls Cas three times in a row before leaving a voicemail.

“You’re scaring me, man. I hope you’re OK and your phone just died or something, because I’m starting to freak out here. I need you, so if you’re in trouble you need to find a way to let me know. Please get here soon.”

After he hangs up, he looks at his phone for a long time, his thumbs hovering over the screen while he decides what to do. He calls Crowley. A woman answers.

“Hello, darling,” she says. “Have you gotten your dog on a leash yet?”

“Who the fuck is this?” Dean asks even though he already knows the answer.

“Oh, don’t play dumb with me,” Crowley says derisively. “I had to ditch my usual meat suit because my dear mother sicced a rabid Castiel on me. So, as I was saying, do you have him on a leash yet?”

“I can’t reach him. That’s the only reason why I called you, so now that I know you’re no help, I’m hanging—”

“Wait, wait, wait, you don’t know where he is? Or if he’s even alive?”

“I would know if he was dead,” Dean says on automatic, no hesitation, even though it’s something he’s never actually thought about until it came out of his mouth. He knows the truth of it even if he doesn’t understand it. “If you hear anything, call me. Please.”

Dean hangs up before Crowley can say anything else. He can’t deal with a female version of Crowley anyway. Too many bad memories from his time as a demon. 

While he’s brushing his teeth at the sink in his room, Sam knocks on his door and, as usual, comes in without waiting for a response. 

“By this time last night, the baby had woken up crying three times,” he says, leaning against the door jamb and just watching Dean brush his teeth. “She might even sleep through the night. At some point we have to, um, deal with how quickly she’s, you know, aging.”

Dean spits into the sink and nods at Sam.

“Hear anything from Cas?” 

“No, nothing,” Dean replies. “Look, I’m still pretty beat from, uh.” Dean pats the inside of his right forearm. “I’m sorry we’re just kind of stuck here, but we can’t exactly go anywhere with a baby in the backseat, and we need to be here whenever Cas shows up anyway. So I’m gonna get some shut-eye. Wake me up if the kid needs anything.”

Sam furrows his brow and opens his mouth, then changes his mind and leaves. Dean can feel that Sam is itching to do more than sit around the bunker taking care of a baby and waiting for Cas, but Dean is so acutely focused on those two things that he won’t even look at the news, won’t even do a Google search for fear of finding out that the infection has reached other towns. 

Dean is woken up in the dead of night by the sound of someone breathing heavily in the hallway. He rushes to his door and flings it open to find Cas on the other side, looking worse for wear and holding himself up by putting all his weight against the wall. As he staggers into the light of Dean’s room, Dean sees that the whites of his eyes are bright red, and he has blood dripping from his mouth and down his chin. Dean wordlessly helps him to the edge of the bed and then sits down next to him, keeping a hand on his back to hold him upright.

“Help me,” Cas says.

“Cas, what the hell?”

“I can’t heal myself.” Cas winces and nearly falls against Dean. Dean grabs his shoulder to support him. “I was captured by angels, and they—they tortured me, but I’m OK. Well, I’m not OK. This spell Rowena...I think she’s the only one who can break it, and I don’t know how much longer—I don’t know if I can…”

“Whoa, it’s OK. It’s OK, Cas,” Dean soothes as he helps his friend lie back against the headboard. There’s blood spreading across the inside of Cas’ white shirt, so Dean gingerly unbuttons it and finds a deep gash from his belly button to his hip. “Angel blade?”

“Yes.”

“Well, nothing some stitches can’t fix. Just hang on a second.” 

They keep makeshift first aid kits all over the bunker, including under Dean’s bed, for exactly this type of situation. Dean uses a curved sewing needle to suture wounds, because it moves with his fingers easier than a straight needle, so he pulls one out and sterilizes it before carefully sewing Cas up.

Neither of them say anything the first few times Dean pushes the needle through his skin and pulls the thread through, but about a quarter of the way done, Cas says quietly, “You can’t hurt me, Dean, you don’t have to be so meticulous.”

Dean huffs a laugh and keeps working just as gently as before. “You can’t heal this, so I’m not giving your vessel a permanently jagged scar from some pisspoor suture job. You’re gonna have perfectly healed stitches just like everybody else I’ve ever sewed up, you got that?”

It takes Cas a second to answer. “I could fix the scar once I’m back to full strength.”

“Yeah, well. Still.”

They’re silent again until Dean is on the last few stitches.

“Do you know anything about the Darkness?” Dean asks casually. 

“The Darkness? It’s nearly infinite power, but it’s been gone since long before humans roamed the earth. Long before anything, actually. Why?”

“We freed it.” Dean grabs bandages and places one on Cas’ stomach. “Whatever you and Sam did to get rid of the Mark, it freed the Darkness.”

“That’s not possible.”

Dean starts cleaning up a less serious wound under Cas’ right pec. “She’s asleep in the room down the hall.”

“What?”

“Sam and I haven’t exactly talked about it or tried to confirm it, but, uh, I think the Darkness is a baby. And we’re taking care of her.”

“Dean,” Cas chastises. He grabs Dean’s wrist to make him stop bandaging him. They look at each other.

“It’s a baby, Cas. What were we supposed to do?” Dean slowly pulls his hand away; Cas lets him go. “Better that she’s here, where we can keep an eye on her.” 

“I don’t understand why the Darkness would be a baby,” Cas says. “What makes you think it’s the Darkness?”

Dean hesitates. He refocuses back on Cas’ body, tending to the rest of his wounds, as he considers what to say. He and Sam have been avoiding the subject so completely that it feels odd that Cas is so willing to discuss it. As Dean cleans the cut on Cas’ bottom lip, he says, “She has the Mark of Cain. And she’s barely out of the womb and might already be walking by the time she wakes up, I don’t know.”

“This is bad.”

“Yeah, you think?”

“She’s a time bomb, Dean. We need to—” Cas cuts himself off with a cry of pain. He squeezes his eyes shut tight and rocks forward, his teeth gritted. 

Dean puts his arms around him and presses his hands hard against the back of his coat. “Whoa, Cas, come back to me, come back to me.”

The door swings open. Sam comes in, wearing his pajamas.

“Cas?” he says, but Cas is still groaning against Dean’s chest. Sam looks at Dean. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I think it’s the spell. We need to find Rowe—”

“You need some kind of protection against me,” Cas interrupts, speaking loudly as if he’s trying to be heard over something only he can hear. “Quickly. I could be dangerous.”

Cas feels so human and familiar in Dean’s arms that it seems impossible that he could turn at any moment, but they listen to him anyway. Sam suggests taking him to the dungeon, but then Amara cries from the other room and Sam leaves to take care of her, and Dean thinks there’s no way in hell he’s putting a hurt and scared Cas in the dungeon. He hadn’t even considered it an option. 

Cas relaxes after another minute, falling back against the bed and keeping his eyes closed, his chest heaving with deep breaths. Dean watches him warily.

“You OK, Cas?”

“You need to put restraints on me. Take me to the dungeon.”

“No. I’m not doing that,” Dean says with conviction. “I’ll get some shackles, put some Enochian crap on there to hold you in case you go rabid. But you haven’t attacked me yet, so that’s a good sign, right?”

Cas just nods minutely. A line of blood falls from his lip, trickling down his chin.

Dean automatically grabs a piece of gauze and soaks up the blood. “Here, I didn’t finish that earlier,” he mutters. He dabs some ointment on Cas’ lip and then fixes a butterfly bandage over it. “There. Good as new.”

“Dean.”

Dean just looks at him.

“Get the chains.”

Dean sighs and gets up from his bed, reluctant to leave Cas but not wanting to move him. Cas needs to stay put so he doesn’t tear his new stitches. 

Dean passes Sam in the hallway and tells him to stay with Cas while he gets the restraints. 

It’s still the middle of the night. After they get cuffs around Cas’ hands and feet, Sam apologizes for needing some rest and then says a casual “goodnight,” leaving Dean and Cas to figure out what to attach the chains to. 

“I’ve got a cot in the closet, I’ll stay on that so you don’t have to get up from the bed,” Dean insists. 

Cas argues, of course, but while he’s voicing his protests Dean just hooks the chain up to the headboard and goes to the closet. Cas attempts to get up even as Dean is tucking himself under a blanket on the cot. 

“Cas,” he says, exasperated, lying on his back in the dark. “I need some sleep, and I can’t leave you alone. You’re hurt, and I swear to god if you rip those stitches—just stay on the bed. Please.”

There’s some huffy breathing and some shuffling, then the light jangling of metal, but Cas doesn’t say anything else. 

And if he has any other problems or episodes during the night, Dean sleeps through it. 

In the morning, Dean has to hide how badly his back hurts so that Cas can’t give him some compassionate version of “I told you so.” Just like the previous morning, Sam comes in with Amara, but this time he’s given her a bottle and is holding her confidently in his arms. Dean stands at his sink and washes his face.

“Did you sleep, Cas?” Sam asks, and Dean is glad that the cot is still out so that Sam isn’t tempted to ask any uncomfortable questions. 

“I don’t need sleep,” Cas responds. “I just sat here quietly.”

“How do you feel?”

“Terrible.”

Sam and Dean share a look. Sam says, “I thought your angel wiring would fight it off, or slow it down at least.”

“It appears I simply respond differently from humans.”

“If you were human, you’d be dead,” Dean says. “With you, it’s like it’s digging deeper.” He shakes his head. “We gotta find Rowena. Today.”

While Sam shows Cas the baby, Dean calls Crowley and gets his voicemail. He calls him twice more before giving up. 

“Crowley’s not going to help,” Cas says as he examines the Mark of Cain on Amara’s shoulder. “Even if he knows where she is, he’d rather let the spell do whatever it’s going to do to me.”

“Not gonna stop me from trying to convince him,” Dean mumbles to himself. 

For a good chunk of the morning, they all hang out in Dean’s room, Sam, with his laptop, and Cas and Amara all spread out on the bed while Dean paces and scrolls through his phone, looking for anything that might help. Sam finds a promising lead a few hours away and calls a hunter to help, some guy he met while Dean was a demon. All he says is the guy’s name is Clint. 

Cas continues getting worse after Sam leaves. Amara takes her first steps around noon. 

When Cas has a seizure, Dean puts him on his side and stays with him until it passes, even though he can hear Amara toddling down the hall and knows the bunker is absolutely not baby-proofed. Something crashes and clangs in the kitchen; Dean cleans the foam from Cas’ mouth. 

Sam returns late in the evening with Rowena in handcuffs. They take her to the dungeon to question her, and once they have her locked down, Dean tells Sam to go check on Cas. 

“Oh no, I had a deal with the other one,” Rowena says smugly once Sam is gone. “I de-spell your angel, and then I go free.”

“Yeah, about that,” Dean says. “We’re gonna need the Book of the Damned.”

“Our deal says—”

“Our deal says whatever I want it to say because I have your son on speed dial.”

“Call him,” Rowena says confidently. “If I’m dead, you’ve got a big fat pile of nothing. No book ever. And your precious friend with the bent halo? He goes foaming-at-the-mouth mad and dies. I know he’s here, I can tell by that poor sadness in your eyes.” Rowena _tsks_ at him. “You’ve got to get better at hiding those emotions, Dean, or else someone might find out whatever little secrets you’re hiding in there.”

“Shut up. I’m not letting you go without getting that book.”

“You know, I read quite a bit, but the book wasn’t specific about what we were doing. What hell have you unleashed on the world?”

Dean doesn’t answer. Sam comes in a second later and says, “Cas is gone. He—it looks like he broke free.”

Dean takes half a moment to glare at Rowena, but she shrugs innocently, so he rolls his eyes and storms out of the dungeon. 

Amara cries a lot when they pull her out of bed and stick her in the car seat that she’s very nearly outgrown, but they don’t have any other options. Finding Cas is an all-hands-on-deck type of deal. They track his location through his phone and find that he’s stopped somewhere about a half hour drive from the bunker.

Rowena talks incessantly over the noise of the fussy baby. It’s impossible to drown out either of them. 

“...Should never make deals with the Winchesters, since they seem unable to hold up their end of the bargain,” she says. 

Dean gives Sam a look before turning back toward the road. “What’s she talking about?”

“Oh, surely you knew Sam made a deal with me to kill my son if I removed the Mark of Cain from your arm. Well, is the Mark gone? Yes. Is Crowley dead? No.” She pauses and makes eye contact with Dean through the rearview mirror. “Oh! He didn’t know! He didn’t know.”

“Sam, you said we needed to stop keeping secrets from each other, and this is now the second secret you’ve kept in 24 hours,” Dean says in a low tone, staring at the road. 

“I see what Dean’s saying,” Rowena interjects. “Your wee pal Castiel wouldn’t be in this pickle if Crowley were dead, if I hadn’t had to use the attack dog spell, then—”

“This isn’t about Cas. You’re gonna fix Cas,” Dean says. “And if you don’t fix Cas, so help me, not only will I kill you, I’ll make sure Crowley lives forever. Eternal life for Crowley, just to piss you off.”

“Dean,” Sam says. “We’re getting Cas back, it’s OK.”

Dean grips the steering wheel tighter. Amara finally stops crying. 

When they reach the warehouse where Cas presumably is, Sam and Dean silently split up their responsibilities, with Sam staying with Rowena and Amara while Dean goes inside to get Cas. 

It doesn’t take long to find him. He barely even looks like Cas, blood pouring from his eyes, drool covering his chin, shoulders hunched as he holds a screaming woman by the throat. 

“Cas!” Dean yells as he approaches slowly from the side, his hands outstretched, wishing he could just grab his friend and bear hug him back into himself. “This isn’t you, it’s the spell. You need to let her go. You can beat this. Come back to me, Cas. Come back to me.”

Something shifts in Cas’ demeanor, and Dean knows before it happens, and he’s able to catch Cas in his arms the second he lets the woman go. She runs off as Dean slumps to the floor, holding Cas.

“Cas. Cas, I need you to fight this,” Dean whispers even as he can feel Cas tense up again.

Dean tries to tighten his grip, tries to contain Cas’ unnatural wrath within his arms, but he’s only human, he doesn’t have the power of the Mark anymore, and he can’t. He can’t. 

Cas beats the shit out of him.

Dean tastes metal in his mouth and he can barely see through swollen eyes, and he’s just one or two hits away from having a broken jaw when finally Rowena’s voice carries over and Cas collapses in a heap on the cold floor. 

It hurts to move, but Dean leans forward and reaches out, places a gentle hand on Cas’ shoulder and begs him to open his eyes. When Cas does, Dean helps him to a sitting position and then holds his face in his hands, stroking a thumb across his cheek and wiping a trail of blood away.

“Dean,” Cas says, a bit hoarse.

Dean pulls him into his arms and buries his battered face in his hair. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning that Dean will continue experiencing side effects that include vomiting and grotesque visions for several chapters to come.

Rowena gets away. They aren’t any closer to getting the Book of the Damned back.

When they get home to the bunker, Sam gets Amara to sleep once again and Dean fixes a bag of ice to put on his face. Cas slumps into a chair.

“Dean. There aren’t words,” Cas says when Dean sits across from him at the war room table.

“You’re right,” Dean replies easily. “There aren’t words, ‘cause there’s no need. You were under a spell. It’s fine.”

Cas looks at Dean’s swollen face with such a sadness in his eyes that Dean has to look away from him.

“Let me fix it at least,” Cas says as he reaches his hand across the table, two fingers stretched toward Dean’s forehead. 

Dean pushes his hand away. “No, no, no. It’s fine, Cas. I had it coming.”

Cas just looks at him some more. Dean moves the ice, blocking the view of his face. 

“I felt that I…” Cas starts. It takes him so long to continue that Dean chances a look at him, but Cas is staring down at the table. “Even under the spell, I felt that I couldn’t kill you. I could’ve killed that woman, and likely would have, had you not shown up. But I don’t think I could’ve killed you.” He blinks, and his eyes are on Dean again.

Dean holds his gaze. “Well, you’re really strong. You could definitely fight it better than a human could.” He shakes his head. “I’m glad you didn’t kill me.”

Cas doesn’t say anything else, and Dean is glad for that, too. He wasn’t afraid of Cas—even when he was hitting him so hard he couldn’t see—because he’s just not capable of being afraid of Cas. It didn’t even cross his mind that Cas could’ve killed him.

And if Dean were a better man, maybe he would tell Cas that he couldn’t kill him, either. That under the influence of the Mark, he held an angel blade above Cas’ face and ultimately could not do what the Mark was telling him to do. 

But he’s not sure that’s true. Part of him thinks he isn’t strong enough, and that he could’ve easily killed Cas.

Sam comes in, yawning and announcing that Amara is asleep. He retrieves three beers from the kitchen and joins them at the table. 

“Cas, how you feeling?” he asks. 

“I’ll be OK.” He picks up his beer and turns it in his hand, looking at it curiously. “I may need some rest.”

Dean drinks his beer and takes two attempts to swallow it. It feels like sludge going down his throat. He adjusts the ice on his face, hoping that Cas and Sam don’t notice that he’s struggling.

“Take as much time as you need, Cas,” Sam says. “Amara’s in the room between mine and Dean’s, but you can take the one at the end of the hall.” He cuts his eyes over to Dean and then back to Cas. “The one by Dean’s room. There’s a TV in there, actually. We’ll show you how to work Netflix.”

“What’s a Netflix?”

Dean ducks his head to hide his smile. “C’mon, buddy, I’ll show you.”

Sam nods at them as they leave together, both Dean and Cas moving gingerly and hovering into each other’s personal space but not quite touching. 

As they walk down the hall, Dean says quietly, “You ripped your stitches, didn’t you?”

Cas looks down and palms at the dark red stain on his shirt. “Yes. I healed myself, but you were right. I’m going to have a scar there.”

“Here, let me take a look.”

They move in tandem together to the edge of the unused bed in Cas’ new room. Dean sets his ice pack aside and unbuttons the bottom of Cas’ shirt. “You want me to run this through the wash?”

“Yes, I, um, don’t think it’s worth using my grace to clean my clothes.”

Dean huffs a laugh. “It never even registered to me that you usually do that.” He runs his fingers along the small, even scar on Cas’ abdomen. “Wow, this looks good. The guy who stitched you up must’ve known what he was doing.”

Cas rolls his eyes and smiles softly at Dean. “He had very steady hands.”

“Alright, well, let me get you some clothes to change into. Do you wanna shower or anything?”

“I suppose I could shower instead of using my grace.”

Dean turns the TV on and pulls up Netflix. “So the more human stuff you do, the more you can conserve your grace? Will you need to eat, sleep, things like that?”

Cas takes the remote from Dean and quickly scrolls through a list of movies. “I don’t think so. Well, maybe I’ll sleep. I like sleep.”

Dean gets Cas a couple changes of clothes and some pajamas from his own closet. When he gets back, he finds Cas watching some low-budget documentary, lying back with his coat off and his shirt completely unbuttoned, his tan torso on full display. He makes a move to cover himself when Dean comes in, but Dean waves him off and sets the clothes on the bed. 

“Pants might not fit right, but we’re close enough in size,” Dean says in an even tone, like it’s no big deal that he’s giving his best friend his own clothes to wear. “I’m gonna try to get some sleep, you OK?”

Cas nods. “Dean.” He pauses the documentary. “I don’t want you to be in pain because of me. Please, let me heal you.”

“No. Just drop it. It’s not even close to what I—I have to pay a price, OK? I’m going to bed, but if you need anything, you can just—you can knock on my door. Night, Cas.”

Cas only says, “Goodnight, Dean,” before Dean leaves.

In the early morning hours, Amara wakes up wailing and Dean sleepily goes to her. He holds her up against his chest and paces around her room in an attempt to get her to go back to sleep. Once she seems calm enough, he carries her back to his own room and lies down with her pressed to his chest. 

A couple hours later, Amara wakes up again and Dean walks her out to the kitchen to find Sam on his laptop, drinking coffee.

Without looking up from his screen, he says, “Did you two sleep well?”

“Hmm,” Dean grunts. He lets Amara walk unsteadily over to the fridge with him. 

“You’re gonna get too attached,” Sam chastises. 

“She’s a baby, Sam. What the hell else am I supposed to do?”

Amara blows her tongue and wraps her arms around Dean’s leg and squeezes. Dean shuffles around the kitchen with her attached to him, putting eggs and bacon on the stove and getting applesauce out of the pantry. He’s thinking about going on a supply run to get Amara baby food and maybe even real food since he’s sure she’ll be growing teeth any minute when he turns around and is pulled up short by Cas stepping through the doorway, his hair fluffy and disheveled, wearing a soft gray t-shirt and jeans that hug his hips a little too tightly and drag just a bit under his bare feet. Dean stands still for so long that Amara gets bored and teeters away from him and over to Sam instead.

“The shower pressure is as good as I remember it,” Cas states. He takes a seat across from Sam, moving slower than usual but clearly trying not to make a big deal out of it.

“Where are your clothes, Cas?” Sam asks, amused. He picks Amara up and doesn’t stop her from slamming her hands against the keys of his laptop.

“Oh, I need to get them,” Dean says. He turns back to the stove. “I’ll put them in the laundry for you.”

“I’m sure I could figure it out myself if you show me—”

“No, no,” Sam interrupts. “Dean is _really_ particular about the laundry. I’ve never even seen the laundry room.”

“There’s an entire room for laundry here?” Cas asks. 

“I don’t know, you’ll have to ask Dean.”

Dean rolls his eyes as he brings plates of food over to the table. He takes Amara out of Sam’s lap and sets her up on the counter to feed her some applesauce. 

“We gotta go into town today,” he says. “We’re gonna need a highchair.”

“By the time we get one, she’ll be a teenager,” Sam says. 

“Cas, what do you think?” Dean asks, his focus still on Amara, applesauce smeared on her face. “Any theories why she’s aging so fast?”

“Um.” Cas sits straighter in his chair and clears his throat. “She’s not human, so it’s difficult to know exactly what she’ll do. I think she has some agency over her aging process, since she’s chosen to start walking before she even has any teeth. She could be similar to a nephil, which is—”

“Whoa,” Dean interrupts. “Oh my god.” He watches as Amara opens her mouth wide and four tiny little white teeth appear out of her gums, two on the top and two on the bottom. “OK, she, um, definitely has some agency. And knows what we’re saying.”

Sam and Cas walk over to take a look at Amara, and they start coming up with theories, but Dean doesn’t hear any of it. He’s thinking about the last time he had to deal with something like this, with a child aging like a fruit fly: his own daughter Emma. She was an amazon destined to kill him, and he very nearly let her because he wanted to die then anyway. He had lost Bobby, he had lost Cas, and when presented with a child—his own flesh and blood, no less—he couldn’t cope with it. He watched her die. He never talked about it after the case was over. 

“...There’s a power coming from her. I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to try to look into her mind or body,” Cas says. 

“Dean? You OK?” Sam asks. 

Dean blinks a few times and looks at his brother. After too long of a pause, he says, “Yeah. Uh, you guys figure out what you can about the kid, alright? I’m going on a supply run.”

He leaves the kitchen quickly so he can lock himself in his room and puke into his sink. 

Once he gets a grip, he remembers to grab Cas’ dirty clothes. What he’s not expecting is for Cas to be in the room when he walks in.

“Oh. Sorry. Just came to grab your clothes.”

Cas is sitting on the bed with several books piled next to him and one open on his lap. He looks up at Dean. “You look terrible.”

“Thanks, Cas.” He grabs the stack of clothes from a chair in the corner of the room. 

“Are you sure you’re OK?”

Dean huffs a laugh and realizes he’s too tired to lie. “No. And it’s not—” he gestures to the bruises on his face, “—it’s something else. I haven’t kept anything down since I lost the Mark. Food, beer, nothing. All comes right back up.” He closes his eyes and rubs the one that’s less bruised. “Everything tastes like shit, and I’m sleeping, like, three or four times longer than normal.”

Cas sets the book aside and walks up to Dean, then he presses two fingers to his forehead and closes his eyes. 

Dean relaxes into the touch, but Cas pulls his hand away too quickly, and Dean has to stop himself from chasing it. 

“Your body’s in homeostasis,” Cas says. “But you could be readjusting, since it’s been so long since you were just...you. Did your habits change when you had the Mark?”

Dean thinks about it. When he had just gotten the Mark, he wouldn't eat or drink anything for several days in a row and didn’t even notice. When he was a demon, sustenance never crossed his mind. After, though, he tried to keep up with his old habits just so nobody would get suspicious. His whole life felt like a performance. 

“I, uh, never really felt hungry when I had the Mark,” Dean says honestly. “And alcohol—I mean, I may as well have been drinking water.”

“Hmm.” Cas nods and scrutinizes Dean, looking over his body and face with a pensive intensity. “You may just need some time to rest.”

“Great, we’ll hole up here together, feeling sorry for ourselves and bingeing Netflix while Sammy does all the work. Sounds good.” Dean heads toward the hall but stops in the doorway. “Thanks for checking on me, Cas. I hope both of us are feeling better by the time Amara grows up.”

Dean passes Sam and Amara in the hallway, and when Sam raises a questioning eyebrow at him, Dean just holds Cas’ clothes up in response. 

It’s raining sheets when Dean drives out of the garage. He hates when the weather surprises him, when it reminds him that they sometimes spend days in the bunker with no windows to direct their routines. Like living in a casino. 

On impulse, he calls Crowley on his way into town and is surprised when he answers. 

“I still don’t know where my mother is, if that’s why you’re calling,” Crowley says impatiently. 

“She hasn’t tried to come after you?” Dean asks.

“No, but it’s only a matter of time, isn't it? What about the angel, is he any better?”

“Yeah, Cas won’t try to kill you next time he sees you, unless you give him a reason to.” Dean thinks about asking Crowley how he got his body back but decides he doesn’t care, so instead he says, “What do you know about the Darkness?”

“Oh, is _that_ the cosmic shift I’ve been feeling in the past few days? That explains a lot.” Crowley trails off, becomes muffled, as he talks to someone away from the phone. 

Dean taps the steering wheel then turns his windshield wipers down to a slower setting; the rain is letting up. 

“Everything I know about the Darkness is rumors,” Crowley says eventually. “That she’s older than God, older than Death—”

“How do you know she’s a she?” 

Crowley sighs dramatically and says, “You’re a dad now. Congratulations.”

“How the hell did you—”

“Don't act so surprised that I keep an eye on you. You really should check the news, love, because your daughter’s been busy.” Crowley hangs up.

Dean pulls into a shopping center and parks far away from any other cars, then he opens local news on his phone and immediately finds multiple accounts of the infection, with descriptions of people going rabid and killing one another. It seems to be happening within a 10-mile radius of the bunker. 

Dean stares at his phone for a long time, debating whether he should call Sam. Instead, he sends a text to Cas.

_“If you’re not busy, can you look up the news? Infection in the area around the bunker, think it might be Amara. If you can figure anything out about it, call me. I’ll be home in a couple hours.”_

Cas doesn’t text back, but Dean doesn’t think much of it because Cas is, historically, terrible at using his phone consistently.

Dean buys enough stuff to fill the trunk and the whole of the backseat. While loading the car, he feels someone approaching him from behind and immediately puts his hand on the gun in his waistband and turns toward them. He hopes he doesn’t need more than the gun, because every other weapon is buried under a pile of things for Amara.

A short, heavyset white woman looks up at Dean with glassy eyes as she walks slowly toward him, unafraid. “You’re too close to it,” she says in an eerily high-pitched voice. 

“I know,” Dean says, on automatic, and he tries to swallow, to erase his words, but he ends up coughing.

She stands so close to him that Dean has to rock back on his heels and brace himself against the Impala just to be able to look down at her. She’s young, but the skin of her face sags, her cheeks gaunt and disparate from her body and age. 

“It has taken so much already,” she says. “You have to stop it. Only you can stop it.”

“I won’t be able to,” Dean’s traitorous mouth says.

The woman narrows her eyes at him. “You’re too close to it.”

Dean snaps out of it. “Yeah, you said that.”

She turns abruptly and walks away with shuffling feet. He watches her until his phone rings in his pocket.

“Hey, Cas,” Dean answers as he gets in the car.

“You were right,” Cas says. “There are a couple of neighborhoods that have been completely locked down, with nearly two dozen deaths reported so far. The high school has been closed indefinitely.”

Dean slams his hand against the steering wheel then digs his fingernails into the material. “Goddamn it, how is this happening so fast? How is she even doing it?”

Calmly, Cas replies, “Mine and Sam’s theory is that she’s using the infection to ‘fuel’ her development. We don’t know how she’s doing it, obviously, because she is a baby, but there’s no other force currently powerful enough to do this.”

“Alright, well, get some holy oil ready because we’re gonna have to—”

The same woman who approached Dean in the parking lot suddenly walks out in front of the Impala, causing Dean to curse and slam on the brakes, but it’s too late, she’s too close, and he runs right into her. He pitches forward and drops his phone beneath his seat. When he puts the car in park and gets out, the handful of other cars on the road rudely honk at him as they pass. 

The woman isn’t there. There’s no sign she was ever there. Dean checks the front of Baby, but there isn't even a scratch. He hit the woman while driving upwards of 50 miles per hour and there’s no evidence of it. 

He gets back in the car and keeps driving.

His brain goes foggy. He forgets to call Cas back. He drives in a straight line and he’s looking ahead at the road, but he’s thinking about Amara and seeing her perfect little baby face swimming in his vision. She’s looking right at him, and she blows her tongue, then she smiles and laughs, and it relaxes him, eases his tension. Then the image shifts, glitches, and suddenly Amara’s teeth are growing in and there’s too many of them, dozens of them, and they fall out of her mouth in droves and blood pours from her gums and dribbles in globs down her chin—

Dean barely manages to pull off on the shoulder to puke into the grass. 

It takes a couple minutes for him to come back to himself, the sound of his phone ringing growing louder as the world refocuses around him. He stumbles back to the Impala and digs for his phone. It stops ringing, then immediately starts again. He gets to it eventually and answers a call from Sam.

Sam sounds worried. Dean does his best to reassure him that he’s fine, that he accidentally hung up on Cas because he dropped his phone, but he can tell Sam doesn’t believe him. 

When he gets back to the bunker, he sees a black Ford F-150 parked out front and Sam standing by it with two people Dean’s never seen before. Dean takes his time parking in the garage and unloading all the stuff in hopes of delaying having to meet the new people.

While Dean is putting groceries away, Cas and Amara walk into the kitchen together, with Cas slightly hunched over so he can hold her hand. Despite the circumstances, Dean finds himself smiling. 

“Who’s Sam talking to outside?” Dean asks as Amara toddles over to him and reaches her arms up. He scoops her up and presses a kiss to her temple before returning his attention to Cas.

“He called hunters that live nearby,” Cas replies. He grimaces as he slowly lowers himself into a kitchen chair. “They’re a married couple, Clint and Ida May Lerner.”

“Ida May? Are they octogenarian southerners?” 

Cas squints at him. “I don’t think they’re that old, but they _are_ from the South. They moved here after joining the Men of Letters, while you were a demon. At least that’s what Sam told me.”

“OK, well, what the fuck are they doing here?” Dean asks while he sets Amara in her new chair, which is just a tiny baby seat with a tray attached, so she’s still sitting up on the counter but more safely secured now. 

“Sam’s taking them with him to see if they can find and heal any of the infected people in the area,” Cas says. 

Dean clenches his jaw and nods while he feeds Amara, his back to Cas. “Right. While you and me play house.”

“I told Sam I would go, but he insisted that I—”

“No, no, Cas, you need to rest. I’m just—fucking pissed at our situation, but it’s fine.”

Amara laughs and shows Dean her brand new teeth, then she loudly says, “Fucking! Fucking pissed!”

Dean pouts at her. “You’re doing that on purpose. You could’ve picked anything to be your first words, anything in the world.”

Cas laughs and then starts to cough. 

“You OK, bud?” Dean asks.

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

Dean and Cas’ phones both ping at the same time. Dean is still feeding Amara, so he asks Cas to read him the text since he knows it’s Sam in their group thread. 

“He says he’s not bringing them inside because he doesn’t want to…” Cas starts, then, slowly, “...Expose people to Amara? He’s worried that Amara causes illness to those in close proximity to her.”

Dean sets the baby food down and turns to look at Cas. “That could be what’s wrong with me.”

“The infection is visible though.” Cas shifts his eyes, looking at Dean’s neck and arms and then back to his face. “You don’t have any visible signs of it.”

He looks at the floor and thinks for a second, then he turns back to Amara and asks, “Amara, are you making me sick?”

She bangs her fists on the tray and shakes her head vigorously. “No,” she says.

“Alright, that settles that, then,” Dean replies.

“Hm. I don’t know if we can trust the words of a baby.”

Dean cleans Amara’s face and picks her up; she eagerly wraps her little arms around his neck and buries her face against his collarbone. He squeezes her and rubs the side of his face against her head. 

“Dean,” Cas says seriously.

“What?”

“She’s killing people.”

Dean rolls his eyes as he puts Amara down. He then gets one of the bags of toys he bought for her and sets them out for her to play. “I’m sorry, did I not just see you holding her hand when you walked in here? Look at her.” He gestures to the floor, where Amara is hugging a baby doll, kissing its head, then wrapping a little blanket around it and rocking it to sleep. “How the fuck do you expect me to be objective here?”

Cas looks at Amara with a worried expression and doesn’t say anything for several seconds. Then, “What happened earlier? When you hung up on me?”

“I, uh, saw something in the road and thought I was gonna hit it. I don’t know.”

Before Cas can ask any other questions, a thumping noise near the front entrance interrupts them. They both move to check it out, but Dean signals to Cas to stay with Amara. 

As he’s checking the entrance and finding nothing unusual, another, quieter thump sounds from aboveground. He heads outside and scopes out the area, but there’s nothing. It’s raining again.

By the time he gets back inside, Cas and Amara are no longer in the kitchen. Dean opens the fridge, feels his stomach turn sour, closes it again. He calls Cas’ name as he walks down the hall toward his room. The door is half open, so Dean steps in. 

“What was it?” Cas asks, his brow furrowed, as he sits on his bed with Amara in his lap, the TV playing old episodes of _Blue’s Clues._

“She’s too young, you’re gonna rot her brain,” Dean says, leaning against the door frame and crossing his arms over his chest.

“I’m not too worried about that,” Cas says, his eyes fixed on the screen. “Steve is not very good at noticing clues.”

“OK, maybe it’s _your_ brain I should be worried about.” 

“Dean!” Amara says happily.

Dean can’t fight his smile. It’s the first time she’s said his name. It’s the first name she’s ever said. He crosses the room and takes a seat on the bed. “I’m right here, sweetheart.”

Amara crawls over to his lap. He falls asleep before Steve has figured out all the clues. 

“Dean. Wake up.”

Dean jumps and grabs the hand that’s shaking his shoulder, but it’s just Cas. He lets go and puts his arms around Amara, who is curled up and sound asleep in his lap. It’s dark in the room, the TV off. And there are two demons in skinny female bodies standing at the end of the bed.

One demon turns to the other and says, “Do you think this is why Crowley is so fucking pissy all the time? Because his favorite plaything dumped him for an angel?”

The other sticks her tongue out and points her index finger to her mouth in a gagging motion. They both laugh.

“What do you want,” Dean says in a level tone—it’s not a question.

“We want the stupid baby, you dummy.”

Cas moves, but Dean puts a hand to his shoulder and whispers, “Don’t.” Amara is still sleeping.

The demons look at each other. The one who has yet to speak makes a blowjob motion, and they both laugh again.

“Is this a Penn and Teller routine? What the fuck are we doing?” Dean asks.

“You know, we have a bet about this in hell. Which one of you tops?”

Crowley appears, hands in his coat pockets, standing between the two demons. He looks right at Amara as he says, “Thank you, ladies, that’s enough. Fuck off.”

The demons make a fuss but disappear without a fight. 

“Hey, Crowley, you mind sending less horny demons next time?” Dean says sarcastically. 

“The horny ones are the best at breaking wardings.” Crowley squints and looks between Dean and Cas. “I’m going to be honest, I didn’t anticipate you both being here, sat in the same bed together. I was hoping to just steal the baby while everyone was asleep.”

“What do you want with her?” Cas asks, clearly annoyed.

“Please, Castiel, I didn’t come here emotionally prepared to talk to you,” Crowley replies with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Dean, darling, may I have the baby?”

Dean sighs and rolls his eyes. “Do whatever it is you’re gonna do, because you obviously knew we would say no.”

Crowley pauses just long enough to smile before snapping his fingers. Demons appear in every square inch of the room, weapons drawn and bearing down on the bed. Dean and Cas barely even get a chance to react before Amara, clinging fiercely to Dean’s neck, lets out a blood-curdling scream that causes every single demon’s head to puff into a smoky plume, like a candle that’s just been blown out. Headless, they all fall to the floor simultaneously. Amara nuzzles her face into the crook of Dean’s neck; it tickles.

“OK,” Crowley says. “That’s what I thought.”

He disappears, taking the dead demons with him.

Dean and Cas turn to one another and look into each other’s eyes for several long seconds. Something is right on the edge of falling over a cliff, but Dean doesn’t know what it is and he can’t let it fall before figuring it out. 

So instead he gets up from the bed and tells Cas he’s going to put Amara down for the night. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why would I include OCs in this when the SPN universe has ten million characters already, you ask? a) I need people who live close to the bunker because it is ridiculous that Sam and Dean are so alone in the SPN universe when there is no textual reason for them to be and b) if a show is going to do a shit job at including diverse characters then I will do it myself
> 
> I'm planning to post on Sundays! Hopefully it will be weekly, but I'll try to give updates in chapter notes in case I have to slow down at some point. I'm also trying to be disciplined with chapter length, so expect all chapters to be between 4-6k words.


	3. Chapter 3

When Castiel became an angel again thanks to broken grace, he did not move his love for Dean. He kept it inside him, in the beating of his heart, even as his own being stretched back into celestial and galactic realms unfathomable to him when he was human. He once again could feel and experience things as an angel, but he chose to experience his love the way a human does. 

It was difficult. At first, he thought Dean would know. He thought Dean would be able to feel it, with it being so close, just right there inside his rib cage, but Dean acted the same as always. Even when Dean understood that Cas gave up an entire army for him, Cas could tell that Dean didn’t understand _why._

When Dean got the Mark of Cain, he became more myopic than usual, more self-centered. In some ways, it was easier for Cas. There was no chance of Dean noticing his love, so he could show it however he wanted.

Even so, it terrified him. His love for Dean was so acute and chronic that over time it became a prisoner inside the cage of his heart. He couldn’t put it somewhere else even if he wanted to. It was stuck. 

It hurt.

* * *

“The holy oil’s working, but some of the people out here are, uh, resistant to it,” Sam says. “I mean, even knowing that the infection leads to death, it’s still tough to convince people to light their skin on fire.”

Dean huffs a laugh and hears other people laughing in the background. He moves his phone from his left to his right ear and flips a pancake on the stove. “Have you had to put down any people that have gone rabid?”

“Yeah, two,” Sam replies with a sigh. “But we got to a lot of people right on time, so that’s good. We’re splitting up today to cover more ground, and we’ve got designated leaders in the neighborhoods that are distributing the cure and keeping track of everybody’s movements so it doesn’t spread. I won’t be home for a few days at least.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Dean sniffs. “Cas was telling me about the hunters you’re with, they good people?”

Muffled voices speak away from the phone, something like, “We’re the best!” as Sam answers, “Yeah, I’ll introduce you when we get back. I was worried, with Amara…”

“Yeah, I get it. God knows we need more help, so I’ll try not to be too jealous that you made some friends.”

Cas walks in the kitchen and nods at Dean as he takes a seat at the kitchen table. Dean keeps his eyes on Cas for a second too long, taking in the green henley, still confused to see Cas without his usual clothes. 

“Dean? You still there?” Sam asks.

Dean turns back to the pancakes and says, “Yeah, I’m here. Sorry, what were you saying?”

“That it’s good for us to have friends, Dean. We need friends.”

“Right. Yeah.” An image of Charlie swims in his vision. “‘Cause we have such a good track record with friends.”

Sam ignores him. “How’s Cas?”

Dean looks over again and finds Cas smiling as he taps away at his phone. “He’s OK.”

“And Amara?”

“Uh, good. She’s taking a morning nap right now. Sounds like you’ve got everything under control, but let us know if you need anything, alright? Bye, Sammy.”

After he hangs up, Dean sets his phone on the counter and plates the pancakes and bacon. He sets everything out on the table and takes a seat across from Cas.

“You didn’t tell him what happened last night?” Cas asks as he pockets his phone. 

“No,” Dean says. “He would just worry and insist on _doing something_ , and right now I’m choosing not to do anything.” He gives Cas a wide grin and then takes a dramatic bite of bacon.

“Dean, what Amara did—”

“Saved our asses. We couldn’t’ve taken on all those fucking demons, c’mon.”

Cas shakes his head and pushes food around on his plate. “No, but Crowley will come better prepared next time.”

“I ain’t worried about Crowley,” Dean says dismissively. He tries to quickly shovel food away, tricking his body into accepting it. “He wouldn’t kill me, and he’s not gonna kill you because he knows that, uh, well...Never mind.”

Cas looks at him with a concerned expression, his head slightly tilted. “What do you mean?”

“Uh, just that.” Dean sighs. “Crowley and I, uh, went through some stuff together when I was, you know, a demon, and I just—well, let’s just say he knows if he did anything to you then I would kill him.” It comes out all wrong, and Dean’s heart hammers in his chest at the thought of Cas misinterpreting what he said. Something teeters on the edge of the cliff again.

A few awkward seconds pass before Cas answers. “I suppose I should be flattered, but.” He shrugs and looks down at his food. “I would kill Crowley for a lot less.”

The tension eases out of Dean’s body through a breathless laugh. “Yeah, well, maybe one day you’ll get the chance. You gonna try to eat, or no?”

“No, I don’t think I can. I’m starting to feel better, I think.”

“Good.” Dean picks up his empty plate and Cas’ full one and takes them to the sink. As he’s getting tupperware for the food Cas didn’t eat, he says, “If you start feeling like you’re getting cooped up here with me and the kid, you can head out whenever you want. I think I’ve got a handle on Amara.”

“Dean, I—you know I can’t just leave. Not with what happened last night.”

“I told you, if Crowley—”

“I’m not worried about Crowley, I’m worried about Amara. About what she can do.”

They stare at each other across the empty space of the kitchen. Dean is leaned back against the counter, his hands white-knuckling it.

“Dean. I’m not going to hurt her,” Cas says, reading his mind. Or maybe they were having a silent conversation and Dean didn’t realize it; that happens sometimes. “I want to—I need to be here. She is the most powerful being we’ve encountered in all of our time together.”

Amara starts crying. 

Dean leaves the kitchen without saying anything else to Cas.

She’s bigger, her hair longer. Developmentally, she’s probably somewhere between 2 and 3 years old.

While Amara eats a pancake, Dean feels his stomach turn. He can’t make it farther than the kitchen sink before puking, and Amara spends the next few minutes asking, “Hurt? Dean hurt?” 

He decides to take her outside, because it’s the first sunny day since she was born.

He invites Cas to come with them, but halfway up the bunker’s stairs Cas stops and abruptly changes his mind. He rushes back down, and when Dean tries to ask him what’s wrong, Cas just waves him off and says to go without him. 

Amara says, “He be OK, Dean. You and me go outside.”

They stay outside for nearly two hours. It gets a little foggy as time passes, a soft white mist clouding the day. Amara plays with rocks and leaves and brings them to Dean one at a time like she’s handing him something precious and important. They play hide-and-seek after he teaches her how to count to 10. She insists on climbing a tree, which means Dean holds her up to some branches and lets her grab onto them and pretend like she’s actually climbing while he moves her from one branch to the next. They lie next to each other in the grass and look up at the clouds and play a silly version of I, Spy—"I spy something white,” “Is it another cloud?” “Yeah!”—and the corners of Dean’s eyes spill tears down his crow’s feet and into the dew of the grass. 

“Don’t be sad, Dean,” Amara says without even looking over at him. “I love you.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” Dean replies in an even tone, despite the lump in his throat. “Where’d you learn that anyway?”

“Castiel.”

“What?”

Amara points a finger at the sky. “That cloud is lion.” She roars.

Dean finds the cloud she’s pointing to. It does look like a lion.

When they get back inside, Dean sets a bunch of toys out in the library and makes sure Amara is fine playing by herself for a few minutes while he looks for Cas. He finds him slumped down in an uncomfortable armchair in his room, a dopey smile on his face while he watches some mindless TV show.

“You OK, Cas?” Dean asks from the doorway.

Cas doesn’t look away from the TV. “I’m fine. Did you have fun outside?”

“Yeah, uh. Maybe next time you can join us.”

“Sure. Maybe.”

Dean looks at him, at the way the light of the TV shines inconsistently against his face, but Cas is either completely ignoring him or is unbothered by Dean’s staring. So Dean leaves.

Feeling impulsive, he calls Sam.

“Hey, everything alright?” Sam says as soon as he picks up.

Dean is sitting at the table in the library, watching Amara play on the floor. “Yeah, we’re good. I was just, um.” He taps his index finger against the table. “It’s weird, with just me and Cas here with the kid.”

“Weird in what way?” Sam asks carefully.

“I don’t know. He’s kind of distant. I know he’s banged up, but he’s just being, uh, weirder than usual.”

“Is Amara making it weird?”

“No, I’m not—I don’t think it’s her. But maybe. I don’t know.” Dean’s regretting the call. 

“Well, you’re gonna hate this advice, but you could try talking to him.”

“I did, actually. He said he was starting to feel better, and I told him he didn’t have to hang out here if he didn’t—”

“Dean, what the fuck?” Sam interrupts. “You told him to leave?”

“No, that’s not what—”

“He’s the closest we’ve got to family, which I know you know, so maybe stop making him feel like he’s not welcome in our home?” Sam sighs. “God, I’m sorry, Dean. I know you and Cas can be...time bombs around each other, so just try to be, I don’t know, normal until I get back.”

Dean wants to ask Sam what the fuck he means, but he’s terrified of the answer. Quietly, Dean says, “I wasn’t trying to kick him out.”

“I know. But _he_ probably doesn’t know that.”

“Yeah. OK, thanks, Sammy. I’ll talk to you later.”

Cas doesn’t come out of his room for the rest of the day. While Dean is putting Amara to bed that night, he hears Cas pad down the hall toward the bathroom, presumably to take another shower. 

It’s too quiet in the bunker, the walls yawning, stretching in the silence. Dean retrieves a bottle of whiskey and two tumblers and sits by himself in the library, waiting. He manages to get down two fingers before Cas comes in wearing one of Dean’s old t-shirts and soft pajama pants. Dean pours him a glass and slides it across the table as Cas takes a seat.

“I wasn’t trying to kick you out, Cas,” Dean says.

Cas clears his throat. 

“All the shit you went through when you were human, not having a place to stay,” Dean says, “So much of it was my fault, man, and I just—you can always stay here, man. You always have a home here.”

“Thank you, Dean.”

They sit in silence for a few minutes, drinking.

Eventually, Cas says, “I couldn’t go outside today.”

“Hmm?”

“I tried to go outside with you and Amara, and I couldn’t. I kept thinking about how I felt under that spell, and how I wanted to get out and destroy anything I could find, and that was the last time I was outside of these walls. I don’t think I could leave even if I wanted to.”

“Hmm." In a trivial tone, Dean adds, "That ain’t good, Cas.”

Cas drops his head and laughs lightly. Dean knocks back the rest of his drink and immediately feels it coming back up. He folds over himself, head between his knees, and tries to breathe through the waves of nausea. His eyes closed, he sees an image of Amara again, but she’s older this time, elementary-school aged. She laughs and smiles, and as her smile widens her lips stretch grotesquely across her cheeks and split her skin apart all the way to her ears until her jaw drops down, away from the upper half of her mutilated face. 

Cas’ hands are on Dean’s back, then wrapped around his shoulders, fingers squeezing his biceps, weight of his chest pressed to Dean’s side as he speaks in a low tone in his ear. 

“Dean, whatever you’re seeing is not real. It’s not real. Come back—come back to me.”

His eyes still squeezed shut, Dean turns into Cas’ embrace and buries his face against his shirt and manages to get one arm wrapped around his back. Cas stands Dean up and half-carries him to his room, setting Dean on his back in bed and then pressing two fingers to his forehead for a long time. 

Dean thinks he drifted off for a minute, but it’s hard to tell. He opens his eyes and feels the removal of Cas’ fingers from his forehead, and he tries to turn his head to look at Cas but it’s too heavy to move.

“Your brain is a mess,” Cas says, sounding tired.

“Thanks.”

“It must be Amara that’s doing it, Dean. You’re not infected like the others, but it’s something else. Something deep. The longer she’s here, the deeper it’s going to get.”

Dean tries to sit up on his elbows, but his body just won’t let him move. Cas sees him struggling and helps him up to a sitting position, then leaves a hand on his back to keep him steady. 

“What did _you_ do to me?” Dean asks. 

“I’m sorry. I had to root around in your brain to soothe you, and I may have relaxed all of your muscles too much.”

“Oh.” Dean painstakingly turns his head to look at Cas’ profile. “Did you see it? Whatever Amara’s doing to me?”

“No. I just could feel...there was something. Something that felt different than you.” Cas shakes his head. “I was almost there, but it was difficult because you were in so much pain, I couldn’t—”

“I’m not in pain now. You could try it now.”

Dean’s not entirely sure why he’s so eager about this. It’s not like he really wants to know that Amara, a child he’s way too fond of, is actively hurting him, but he keeps thinking about the soothing press of Cas’ fingers against his skin and he wants it again.

Cas looks tired, and concerned, but he agrees anyway and helps Dean lie flat again. Dean closes his eyes and feels warmth wash over him at the press of Cas’ fingertips. 

He falls asleep.

When Dean wakes up, it’s because of a sound in the war room—movement, shuffling, and he doesn’t immediately get up to go check it out because of two reasons.

The first reason is that he knows Sam’s movements well enough to be fairly confident that it’s just him.

The second reason is because Dean is pinned down by an arm on his chest. He’s lying flat on top of the duvet, in exactly the position he was in when Cas pressed his fingers to his forehead, but it seems like Cas passed out while still touching him. He’s facedown next to Dean, and the way his arm is fixed on Dean—elbow bent and hand at the juncture of his collarbone and neck—Dean imagines that Cas nodded off and slowly slipped until they landed here. 

Dean huffs an affectionate laugh and carefully shimmies out from under Cas’ arm. Before he leaves, he watches Cas for a moment and has the ridiculous urge to put a blanket over him. He resists it.

As expected, Dean finds Sam in the war room with his laptop open and a mug of tea in his hand. 

“Dude, what time is it?” Dean asks groggily as he grabs Sam’s duffel bag off the floor and sorts through all the dirty clothes. 

“Uh, like 4 in the morning,” Sam says without looking up from his computer. “I came back to make sure you and Cas were OK, but it seems like you worked your shit out.” He looks up at Dean then, with a knowing smile on his face.

Dean’s eyes widen. “Jesus, dude, what are you doing creeping near my room in the middle of the night? I was having some, I don’t know, headaches, so Cas was just trying to heal me and we both, uh, passed out. Like that. Everything’s fine.”

Sam’s face immediately changes to concern. “Headaches? What kind of headaches?”

“It’s nothing, Sam. I’m probably just—getting old.” He gathers Sam’s clothes up in his arms. “Don’t be weird to Cas, OK? He’s still recovering, and he’s probably gonna wake up worried because he fell asleep while trying to, uh, help me. So just don’t be weird about it.”

“You sure looked comfortable though.”

“That’s exactly what I mean about being weird,” Dean says over his shoulder as he heads to the laundry room. 

He feels his heart beating all the way up to his ears, like it does every time it gets too close to the edge of that cliff. At the time Cas pressed his fingers to Dean’s forehead, it was only around 9 or 10 p.m. It’s impossible to know when Cas fell asleep, but Dean can’t imagine he would’ve been searching around in his brain for longer than a few minutes. Which means they slept completely still next to each other for several hours. 

And Dean still feels exhausted, so after he gets the laundry going he heads back to his room and finds Cas exactly where he left him. He stops in the doorway and turns back to the hallway, looking around to make sure Sam isn’t nearby. He quietly shuts the door and grabs a blanket from his closet. He takes his spot back on the bed but turns to his side this time, away from Cas, and throws the blanket over both of them. Cas doesn’t even stir. 

The next time Dean wakes up, he’s on his other side, facing Cas. Except Cas has turned, too, and is on his side, facing away from Dean. It’s dark—no windows—so Dean looks at the back of Cas’ head until his eyes adjust and he can see him clearly. Dean’s hand rests in the middle of the bed, his fingers tilted slightly toward Cas’ back. He’s thinking about moving his hand when he hears Sam and Amara in the hallway. He jumps out of bed so fast that he wakes Cas. 

Cas, confused, mutters, “What—am I still—where are—”

Dean makes it to the sink just as Sam is knocking on the door. He sticks a toothbrush in his mouth; the door opens.

“There you guys are,” Sam says cheerfully. 

Amara runs to Dean and wraps her arms around his legs. She comes up to his mid-thigh now.

“Sam. You’re back,” Cas says. He sits up on his elbows and frowns down at the blanket. “I don’t remember falling asleep in here.”

“Yeah, Dean said you—”

“You passed out while you were trying to figure out what’s going on in my head,” Dean explains quickly, toothbrush still in his mouth. “I conked out, too, but I got up in the middle of the night and slept on the cot. Didn’t wanna move you.”

“Oh,” is all Cas says.

“It’s OK, Cas,” Dean reassures. “You’re reserving your grace, right? So it makes sense that you would need a good night’s sleep.”

“I slept in your bed,” Cas says, still lying in Dean’s bed. “I hope I didn’t keep you up.”

“Oh no, I’m sure Dean slept great,” Sam says smugly. “On the cot.”

Dean shoots him a look. He scoops Amara up and lets her cling to his back as he walks past Sam and out into the hall. 

Sam stays for the morning, all of them hanging out together in the kitchen for a couple hours and Sam proving that his presence actually helps ease the tension between Dean and Cas. Dean hates that he needs a buffer to spend time with his best friend, and he’ll deny it to Sam for the whole of their lives. 

Almost as soon as Sam heads back out, the vast silence falls over the bunker once again. Dean plays with Amara on the floor of the library, pretending to eat the fake food that she fake makes for him, while Cas sits at the table with a stack of books. Eventually, Cas speaks.

“I don’t think I found anything in your head last night,” he says. “My memory of it is foggy, but I think I would remember if anything significant happened.”

“Did you at least figure out if it was…” Dean points at Amara.

Amara shakes her head. “It’s not me,” she says matter-of-factly.

“Then what is it, sweetheart?” Dean asks.

Amara reaches up to her own shoulder and points with her index finger, tapping on the spot where her Mark of Cain is. 

Dean furrows his eyebrows at her then looks at Cas then back to Amara. “So it’s the Mark of Cain?”

Amara nods. “It misses you.” She goes back to playing with the fake food.

Dean and Cas share a look.

They spend the rest of the day not talking about it. Dean takes Amara outside again; he doesn’t push Cas to join them. They watch TV in Cas’ room in the afternoon, with Amara claiming that she’s too “grown-up” for _Blue’s Clues_ and wants to watch Disney movies instead. Dean checks his phone while they watch _Beauty and the Beast_. He’s surprised Crowley hasn’t called or shown up again, but he’s sure he’s just formulating another plan to steal Amara. While Dean is looking down at his phone, a weight bumps against his shoulder and he looks over to find Cas’ head there, sound asleep. His hair smells like Dean’s shampoo. 

Dean forces himself to remain perfectly still so as not to bother Cas, but stillness is difficult for him. Within just a few minutes, he gets caught up in his own head, his mess of a too-long life haunting him in the quiet moments. He’s pretty good at stamping down the worst of his memories: his time in hell, the apocalypse, losing his parents, losing Sam over and over, losing Cas and Bobby. But the more recent events, they simmer in the front of his brain and needle at him until he feels like he needs to break or kill something. He clenches and unclenches his fist over and over as images of Charlie cloud his vision.

Just as he feels like he’s about to lose it, two small fingers press to his forehead and he opens his eyes to see Amara smiling gently at him. 

“So much pain,” she whispers. “I help like Castiel helps.”

Warmth spreads through Dean’s body, eliminating all the pain in a matter of seconds. He relaxes. A tear slips down his cheek.

“Thank you,” he says, his voice breaking.

Cas wakes with a start, hissing a deep breath and sitting up quickly as he looks between Dean and Amara.

“I’m sorry, Dean, I…” he starts.

Dean waves him off. “Don’t worry about it, Cas. You know, humans usually sleep at night for seven or eight hours. If you try to do that each night, maybe you won’t fall asleep while we’re in the middle of doing stuff,” he teases.

Cas smiles at him. Amara announces that she’s hungry and jumps off the bed to head for the kitchen. Dean gets up with a grunt and a popping of his knees to follow her. 

It isn’t until later that night when Dean is getting ready for bed that he realizes he hasn’t felt woozy or nauseated all day. He didn’t eat much, and he didn’t think to drink any beer or liquor like he usually does. Even just thinking about it, he feels his stomach turn.

So he walks purposely to the kitchen and grabs the two six-packs out of the fridge and dumps each bottle into the sink. He then goes to the liquor cabinet in the library and dumps each of those bottles down the drain—until he gets to the last one. He tells himself Sam might want a drink when he gets home, and that’s his excuse for why he puts the last full bottle of Jack back into the cabinet. 

He passes by Cas in the hallway, Cas’ hair wet from the shower, pajama pants slung low on his hips. Dean’s eyes flicker down to Cas’ bare torso for half a second before he looks at his face.

“Are you alright, Dean?” Cas asks seriously.

“Yeah, uh, just going to bed.”

“You look pale. Did you have another—”

“No, no, I’m fine. Seriously. G’night, Cas.”

Dean knows, the next day, that Cas notices that the alcohol’s gone. He doesn’t say anything about it.

Their routine becomes easier and uneventful over the next few days. Dean still feels sick sometimes after eating, and Cas is still hesitant to go outside, and Amara is still growing at an alarming rate. Despite how it makes him feel, Dean itches for a drink and finds himself gravitating toward that one bottle but unable to actually open it. He gets shaky and feverish a couple of times and locks himself in his room until it passes. He doesn’t have any more visions of a mutilated Amara.

By the time Sam gets home later in the week, Amara looks and acts about 10 years old.

Sam responds with a mix of shock and horror, but he tries not to let it show as Amara runs up to him for a hug.

Clint and Ida May come down the stairs a minute after Sam, both of them looking a bit hesitant until Dean waves them in and loudly announces that he’s Dean. The couple looks to be in their 50s, both Black with dark skin, Ida May small and wiry with a bun of graying dreadlocks, and Clint short and stout with glasses and corkscrew curls cropped close to his scalp. Dean looks at them critically for exactly three seconds before Clint points at himself with a gap-toothed grin and says, “I’m transgender, in case that’s what you’re trying to figure out.”

Dean blinks. “Oh, no, I was just. Sizing y’all up.” He laughs. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, you, too,” Clint responds as they shake hands. “I’ve heard stories. I won’t ask questions.”

“I will,” Ida May cuts in, teasingly pushing Clint out of the way to shake Dean’s hand. “You could do anything you wanted as a demon, and you spent all your time singing karaoke in dive bars? That’s what my lesbian teenage daughter does every weekend, so is this proof that teenagers are demons?”

Dean blinks down at her. 

“Baby, we’re not supposed to scare him, c’mon,” Clint whispers, pushing Ida May toward Sam and Amara.

Dean checks his hip against the war room table and crosses his arms over his chest while he watches everybody interact with Amara. She is sweet and polite and answers their questions about what she’s been up to since she was born. When they ask her if she knows what they’ve been doing over the past week, her brow furrows and her head tilts to the side. She looks at Dean for a moment and then looks at Sam. 

“Did I hurt people?” she asks innocently.

Clint answers, “Well, yes, shug, but we helped most of them.”

“Did you not know, Amara?” Sam asks.

Amara shakes her head sadly. She says something quietly to Sam, but Dean misses it because Cas comes in and looks around in wary confusion. He stands next to Dean and opens his mouth to speak, but Clint and Ida May spot him and come over.

“Oh, Castiel, we finally get to meet,” Ida May says gently. She pulls him down for a hug and then grips him by the elbows to get a good look up at him. “You’re as handsome as I thought you’d be.”

Cas smiles and blushes, then ducks his chin as he says thanks. Dean looks down at the floor to hide his smile.

Clint hugs him, too, and then says, “Gosh, we’ve heard so much about y’all, it’s nice to finally meet you. We told Sam already, but we’re staying the night here, and we absolutely intend to impose. We’ll pay for the pizza.”

“Oh, uh, let me get the guest room set up,” Dean says. “Cas, you’re gonna have to bunk with me again tonight.”

As Dean strips Cas’ bed and goes to his sanctuary, the laundry room, he thinks about how they probably should turn a couple more empty rooms into guest bedrooms. He wants a TV room, but if Sam insists on having friends, they’ll have to make concessions.

Back in the hallway, Dean turns a corner and nearly runs right into Cas. 

“Dean,” Cas says. He stands too close. “I was watching the news earlier, and I saw Metatron. He’s nearby.”

“What? What do you think he’s up to?”

“I don’t know, but he’s human and he probably knows a lot more about the Dar—Amara than we do. I can track him down.”

Dean moves even closer into Cas’ personal space. “You think you’re up for that yet?”

Cas looks away, his chin raised in defiance. “Probably not. My plan is to leave in the morning, that way I have time to...prepare myself.”

Dean puts a hand to his shoulder and squeezes it. “OK. Let me know what I can do to help, buddy.”

Later, after they’ve fought with Amara to get her to go to bed at a decent hour, they order pizza and hang out around the war room table. Dean is listening to Ida May tell Cas ridiculous stories about her daughter when Sam comes in holding the bottle of Jack.

“Dean, please tell me you didn’t drink everything but this,” Sam says, annoyed.

“Oh, uh,” Dean says awkwardly. He shares a look with Cas. “No. Those headaches I was having, I think it was, uh, alcohol causing it, so I tossed some stuff out.”

“Oh,” Sam replies, deflating a little. He gives Dean a pitying look. “I’m gonna put this back then.”

When Sam returns, it’s with a two-liter of coke and a pitcher of ice water. Nobody says anything about it.

Dean only eats two pieces of plain cheese pizza over the span of two hours, and his body is able to accept it without incident. 

Clint and Ida May are talkative and very open, and Cas especially engages them in conversation like it’s the first time he’s ever met humans that aren’t Sam and Dean.

When Cas asks, “How did you two get into hunting?” a kind of quiet falls over the room, like they’re sitting around a campfire in anticipation of a ghost story.

Ida May starts, “Well, we ain’t really hunters, first of all. Both of us grew up in a rural town in South Carolina, and, uh, we was about 15 when it happened. You know, some parts of the South, Jim Crow never really left, so we either learned to cope or we went North. My family had an old farm, so we couldn’t leave it even if we wanted to. Clint here worked for my parents—after school, he’d come get our goat milk or chicken eggs and sell ‘em for us.” Ida May looks at Clint. He takes over the story.

“There was a guy, old, old sharecropper who worked the land,” Clint says, his voice barely above a whisper. “I saw him every day, talked to him sometimes, but he was real quiet. He rarely paused in his work, tending the land and sometimes climbing up in trees like he was finding fruit up there. I never thought much about him because I was in my own business, you know, doing my work and hiding that I was a boy, that kind of stuff. But one day I asked Ida May about the guy, why he went up in the trees, and she…”

“I’d never seen him, had no clue who he was talking about,” Ida May says with a laugh. “Old Black man working the farm? He sure it wasn’t just my daddy? But it wasn’t.”

“There was a white sheriff that drove by sometimes,” Clint continues. “We tried our best to stay under his radar, but he’d come by, ask questions, demand a glass of ice tea, you know. He knew the old man. I saw them talking a couple times, seemed real tense. The sheriff was intimidating to everybody, but he seemed to really antagonize the old man. I saw him spit on his shoes once.”

“And then I woke up one morning to my mama screaming,” Ida May says. “The sheriff was hanging from a tree.”

“So that’s how we learned ghosts is real. And, man, did we help some ghosts,” Clint says with a smile at Ida May.

“Clint had a talent for finding all the ancestors that thought they was still alive, still enslaved. We spent years traveling all over the South, freeing those folks. Sometimes we didn’t get to ‘em ‘til the damage was done, but we didn’t lose much sleep over it.” She shrugs. “They only ever killed racists.”

Dean huffs a laugh and shares a look with Sam. They rarely went on hunts down South, so Dean had no idea any of that was going on in the ghost world. 

Cas asks, “Did you get married because you hunt—I mean, freed spirits together?”

Clint and Ida May both laugh. “No,” Ida May says. “I married a fool when I was 20, had my daughter, got divorced and didn’t find Clint again until he had found himself. I almost didn’t recognize him when I saw him, I was just so focused on how cute he was.”

Clint grabs her hand and kisses her fingers. He then turns toward Dean and Cas and says, “What about y’all? How long you been together?”

Sam spits coke and starts to choke and has to excuse himself. Cas says something, but Dean talks over him.

“We’re not together, you know, Cas is just my—our best friend. Mine and Sam’s.” He clears his throat and stares down at nothing.

Clint, embarrassed, tries to apologize, but he’s interrupted by a knock on the door.

Dean goes on high alert, grabbing his gun out of his waistband and signaling to Cas to stand behind the wall at the bottom of the stairs. Clint and Ida May get the hint, too, and find places to hide and wait. 

It takes Dean a moment to unlock the door. He opens it just slightly. His heart drops at who he sees.

“Charlie?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah I always wanted an opposite of the racist truck episode what about it


	4. Chapter 4

Castiel hardly knew Charlie, but Charlie knew parts of him better than anyone. 

The first time they were ever alone together, Charlie took the opportunity to ask Cas pointblank, “Are you ever gonna tell him how you feel?”

“What?”

Charlie had rolled her eyes at him. “Dean, silly. You love him, don’t you?”

“I’ve never...I don’t…”

Her face dropped in horror. “Oh, god. I’m so sorry. You’ve never told _anyone._ Holy shit.” Charlie gently shoved him into a guest bedroom in the bunker and closed the door behind them. “Cas! How come you’ve never told anyone? Not even Sam?”

“It’s, um. Complicated,” Cas replied. “Telling Dean would be the wrong decision. And Sam, well, he wouldn’t be a reliable confidant. He can keep some things from Dean, but not everything.”

“Why would it be the wrong decision to tell Dean? He’s obsessed with you,” Charlie said like it was nothing.

“Why would you say that?”

“Uh, it’s pretty obvious?” In a sudden moment of clarity, she gasped and put her hands over her mouth. “Oh, no. Dean doesn’t know he’s not straight. Oh my god. I’ve said so many things to him that I would _not_ say to a guy who doesn’t know he’s not straight.” She sat rigid on the edge of the bed, her eyes flitting back and forth like she was thinking through all her interactions with Dean.

“How do you know that he’s not? Heterosexual, I mean.” Cas sat next to her.

Charlie turned her head and squinted suspiciously at Cas. “I think I know a very different Dean than the one you know.”

And then Charlie told Cas about how she couldn’t flirt with a male security guard so Dean did it for her, and about how much he loved LARPing in a complete deconstruction of his usual macho airs, the way he enjoyed judging the outfits she tried on and insisted on letting him decide what she would wear for a case, and, “He talks about you all the time. And then acts embarrassed about it. He talks about Sam all the time, too, but he’s not embarrassed when he talks about Sam.”

Cas took in all the information and felt a lightness in him that was incredibly rare. The Dean that Charlie described was one Castiel definitely wanted to meet.

“Don’t say anything to him, please,” Cas told her a little while later.

“You are, though, right? In love with him?” she pressed.

“Yes. Very much so.”

* * *

As soon as Charlie’s face breaks into a smile, Dean opens the door wide and pulls her into his arms and holds her so tight that she tells him she can’t breathe. He loosens up just the tiniest bit and presses his lips to the top of her head and keeps them there for several seconds while he cries. 

The hug is interrupted by a splash of water.

“I don’t think I’m a demon, Sam,” Charlie says as she and Dean break apart. 

Sam insists on doing all the tests right there in the front entrance, while Cas, Clint and Ida May wait at the bottom of the stairs. 

Charlie passes every test. Dean hugs her again, then he grabs her face in both his hands and hunches a bit to get a good look at her. He says gently, “How are you here?”

She shrugs and reaches up to grip one of his wrists, rubbing her thumb over his skin in reassurance. “I don’t know. I was enjoying the empty nothingness of death, and then suddenly I woke up across the street from here.”

“Empty nothingness?” Dean asks as they walk down the stairs together.

“Yeah, heaven I guess? They replay all your happy memories or whatever? I turned that feature off pretty quick, I’d rather just have the eternal sleep, you know? Life after death gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

When Charlie spots Cas, she practically jumps into his arms. Cas returns her hug, hooking his chin on her shoulder, closing his eyes and smiling. 

Dean hovers, gravitates around Charlie while they all talk in the war room. She insists that she has no idea how she’s back, that she was definitely dead, and that she feels like her regular, human self the way she was before she was brutally murdered.

Dean shares a look with Cas, then the same look with Sam. Whatever is going on, it almost definitely has to do with Amara. 

Clint and Ida May possess the kind of southern hospitality that means they’ve never met a stranger and therefore talk to Charlie well past midnight. Dean sits close to her and attempts to stay engaged in the conversation, but after the second time he nods off Cas taps his shoulder and tells him to go to bed. 

And Dean would love to just get up and go to his room and pass out, but Charlie claims that she’s pretty tired, too, and would like to know where she’ll be sleeping. 

Somehow, she ends up in Dean’s room with him and Cas. 

“Oh, by the way, Dean, before I turned the lights out I met your buddy Ash,” Charlie says as Dean pulls the cot out of the closet. He gets a t-shirt and a pair of gym shorts, too, and tosses them at her. She continues, “Both of you turn around so I can change. Anyway, he, like, heaven hops. He showed me a lot of the stuff he was working on, and we started experimenting together, and that’s how I figured out how to shut my heaven down. He introduced me to some other people, too, and oh my gosh everybody was so pretty. Dean, I can’t believe you had a thing with Jo, she’s like, totally your sister. OK, you guys can turn back around. Pamela would still sleep with you though.”

Dean feels like he has whiplash as he tries to take in everything Charlie said. His shirt swallows her whole, and she takes a hair tie from her wrist and wraps it around the extra elastic in the waistband of the shorts so they don’t fall down. She gives Cas a wide-eyed look before returning her gaze to Dean.

“Well, you know, I was young and stupid, and Jo, she was only a couple years younger than me when we—when she…” Even after all this time, Dean can’t bring himself to say it. 

“Oh, Dean, I didn’t mean to—oh, come here,” Charlie soothes, closing the distance between them and wrapping her arms around Dean’s neck. “I’m sorry. They’re all very happy in heaven, and they said they hoped they wouldn’t see you up there soon. Of course, they didn’t know I’d be back here to tell you that. Whoops.”

Dean laughs and kisses her temple as they break apart. Charlie turns to Cas then, wide-eyed again, and makes some kind of gesture to him that Dean doesn’t catch. Cas shakes his head in response. 

Charlie jumps on the cot and settles in.

“Whoa, hey, I was gonna sleep there,” Dean says, offended. “You’re a guest, you should get a bed. Cas can stay awake if you don’t wanna share with him.”

Charlie pouts at him. “Is Cas not a guest, too?”

Dean looks at Cas, but Cas remains suspiciously quiet. 

“No, Cas is not a guest,” Dean says, still offended. “Cas is a sometimes resident and a sometimes sleeper. Now would you please get in the damn bed?”

“No, I’m gonna sleep on the cot,” Charlie says with a smile. She lies down and pulls a blanket over her head. “Goodnight.”

Dean puts one hand on his hip and rubs his eyes with the other. 

“Dean,” Cas says quietly. “It’s fine. Like you said, I can stay awake—”

“No, no, Cas, I was just saying that to argue.” Dean goes to the sink and pops a few ibuprofen. “I don’t mind sharing.”

He’s telling the truth, but it’s still difficult when he gets in bed. He feels pumped full of adrenaline from Charlie being alive, but they didn’t even tell her about Amara, and it’s probably going to make for an awkward morning. He shifts and turns under the covers for several long minutes until two familiar fingers gently press his forehead to make him stop.

“Go to sleep, Dean,” Cas whispers in the dark. 

He does.

He sleeps through the night and actually feels well-rested in the morning. When he wakes, it’s to the sound of whispers from the end of his bed. He groggily shifts and is about to make his presence known when he realizes Cas and Charlie are talking about him, so he stays still and listens.

“...Turned into a father, you’ll see when you meet her,” Cas whispers.

Charlie replies, “Has it made him softer around the edges? A little nicer to you?”

“I may have been unfair when I was confiding in you. The Mark was a big source of the meanness—”

“C’mon, don’t make excuses, he was a total _B_ to you sometimes!”

Dean clears his throat and sits up on his elbows. Both Charlie and Cas jump and look over their shoulders at him. He gives them a bitchface. 

“I should’ve never introduced you two,” he says by way of greeting.

“I’m, um. I’m going to get ready,” Cas says stiffly as he stands and walks to the door.

Charlie hops up and rummages through Dean’s nightstand. “Where’s your moisturizer? I need some.”

Dean slowly gets to his feet, stretches his aching back, then grabs a bottle from the shelf above his bed and tosses it at Charlie. 

“Yay, thank you,” she says as she applies the lotion to her face. “When were you planning on telling me that you have a _kid?”_

“Uh, today, I guess. You wanna meet her?” Dean asks.

“Sure.”

It’s still early in the morning though, and Amara tends to wake later as she gets older. Charlie joins Sam, Clint and Ida May out in the kitchen while Dean insists that he needs to shower and shave. When he walks into the communal bathroom, however, he finds Cas standing at the sink with only a towel wrapped around his waist and a straight razor in his hand.

“Dean,” Cas says like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t be. “I was just finishing up.”

Dean walks over to him and takes the razor out of his hand. He goes through the cabinets and gets his electric razor then goes back to Cas’ side and holds it up. “Not using your grace to stay clean-shaven, huh? Like purgatory. C’mon, turn toward me.”

Cas turns not just his face but his whole body. Dean grabs a clean towel from the rack and wipes the shaving cream from Cas’ face before putting the electric razor to it. They don’t make eye contact while he works.

In a quiet voice, Cas asks, “Will you, um, help me leave today?” This is when he makes eye contact.

“Yeah, of course, buddy.” Dean finishes shaving his face and puts the razor down. “I can take you out through the garage, you know, make it a little easier.”

“Thank you.”

Dean gives him a friendly pat to his newly-shaven cheek. 

“And thank you,” Cas continues, putting a hand to Dean’s shoulder to stop him from moving away. “Thank you for being kind to me while I’ve been healing. I don’t know what I would’ve done had you not allowed me to stay here.”

Shifting his weight to be more fully in Cas’ personal space, Dean furrows his brow and says, “Cas, listen to me. You always have a home here. I know I can be...I know things aren’t always, uh, easy. But with both of us being a little worse for wear lately, and taking—raising Amara togeth—well, it’s been good.” Dean clears his throat. “I don’t know what _I_ would’ve done without you here, is what I’m saying. So, thank _you.”_

Cas gives him a sad expression and sets his mouth in a hard line. His eyes drop toward the floor. “If, after I leave, something changes and you need help with Amara, I can come right back. Whatever you need.”

Dean nods and runs his tongue along the inside of his teeth. He clears his throat again. “Well, uh, right now I need you to leave so I can shower.”

That gets a smile and a small laugh out of Cas. He leaves the bathroom still wearing just a towel. Dean doesn’t watch him go, but he waits until he hears the door close before he turns the shower on.

He gets a little shaky under the spray, and he has to turn the faucet to scalding hot to try to manage the chills that rack his body. He realizes belatedly that he wants a drink, badly, and he can’t think about anything other than the still unopened bottle of Jack in the library.

He pushes it down and down and down until it feels like he can face other people again, but his hands are still shaking when he gets out of the shower so he forgoes shaving. He’s still got a couple more days before Sam will worry and ask him why he’s letting his stubble grow.

Clint and Ida May head out before Amara’s up, insisting that they need to get home to their three cats. 

Cas has his own clothes back on, and he ignores Dean when he tries to convince him to expand his wardrobe. They get into a silly argument about it that effectively ends when Cas asks Dean why he cares so much what he wears. Though he winds up feeling embarrassed, bickering about Cas’ clothes is the thing to break Dean out of his funk and to get his hands to stop shaking.

When Amara gets up, they’re all gathered in the library together drinking coffee and checking the news, making sure the work Sam, Clint and Ida May put in is still set in place. Amara walks in almost shyly, her eyes immediately landing on Charlie.

“You’re here,” Amara says knowingly.

Charlie looks at Dean and then at Amara. “Uh, you were expecting me?”

Amara deliberately steps toward Charlie until she’s just a couple feet away. She folds her hands demurely in front of her. “Of course. I brought you here.”

There’s a long pause before Dean cuts it with, “Well, that answers one question.”

Amara makes a confused face at Dean. “I thought you knew. I’m sorry.”

Dean shifts in his chair and leans forward so he’s on the level with Amara. “Amara, sweetheart, Charlie was dead. I didn’t even know you could bring her back.”

“Dead? I don’t know...I don’t know what that is,” Amara says slowly.

“You what?” Dean asks.

“I don’t know dead,” Amara repeats. “You thought often about Charlie, you missed her, you love her, so I found her and brought her here. Isn’t that what you wanted?” Her voice raises toward the end; the lights flicker.

“Yes. Yes, honey, of course,” Dean reassures, his tone a bit panicked. “Thank you. Thank you so much for bringing Charlie to me.”

Silence falls over the room again. Cas moves in his chair, angling himself toward Amara.

“Amara,” Cas says gently. “You’ve never met Death. It’s OK. But when someone is dead, we don’t expect them to come back. Here, to earth.”

Amara looks at each of them individually. Then she says, “You’ve all been to other planes besides earth. Have you all met this Death?”

Sam, Dean, Cas and Charlie answer nearly simultaneously, in the affirmative. Amara’s eyes fly back and forth among them. Cas is the one who tries to explain.

“We are different than most, Amara,” he says. “There are ways to defy Death, and Sam and Dean have discovered most of them. And then there are very special cases of someone coming back from being dead for a reason, like when the will of heaven required Dean to be alive on this earthly plane a few years ago, so I was sent to the depths of hell to forcibly pull him out.” He leans closer to Amara and boops her nose. “Your way of getting Charlie was much safer.”

Amara smiles at Cas as she says, “I’m beginning to understand. When most people become dead, they remain dead?”

“Yes,” Sam answers. “You don’t have to say ‘become dead,’ they just die. When people die, they go to heaven or they...they go to hell, and they stay there.”

“Well, that sounds ridiculous,” Amara replies. “I’d like to meet this Death and have a word with them about this situation.”

Dean fights the smile pulling at his lips. He and Cas have been doing the best they can at homeschooling Amara, and it’s made her adopt a similar cadence to the way Cas speaks. Dean says, “We know Death, actually. He’s a pretty cool guy, all things considered.”

Dean swallows and decides not to say anything else. His and Sam’s last meeting with Death had been fraught, to say the least, with Dean holding Death’s scythe and knowing there was no way he could kill Sam, as Death wanted him to do. He was considering turning the scythe on Death himself when the Mark of Cain burned so fiercely off his arm that he dropped the scythe to the floor. Death disappeared as the Darkness descended. 

“Everyone dies at some point, Amara,” Sam says. “We—people—can’t stay on earth forever. It’s sad for the people left behind on earth, because we no longer get to see that person anymore, but it’s a part of life that we have to accept.”

Amara squints at him. “Except you don’t. You all come back from being dead all the time.”

Dean stands up and jokingly tells Sam “good luck” before he heads to the kitchen for some more coffee. While he’s making a pot, he listens to the muffled voices through the walls and smiles. 

“Dean,” Cas says from the kitchen’s threshold.

“Jesus, I didn’t hear you come in,” Dean says with a laugh as he pours his new cup of coffee. “What’s up, man?”

“I think it’s time for me to go.”

Dean sets his mug down. “Right. Let’s do it.”

Cas does fine until they get in the garage. He freezes about five feet away from the car Dean picked out for him, his body rigid and his eyes unfocused. Dean gets in his personal space and puts a hand on Cas’ shoulder, moving his head down just a bit so they’re perfectly eye level. 

“Hey, look at me,” Dean says, imbuing his voice with confidence. “I’m right here. You need anything, you call. You come right back here if you feel like you need to, OK?”

Cas doesn’t say anything, but he nods. His eyes drop to the floor. His whole body violently shakes. He makes a horrifying, anguished noise. 

Dean moves his hand from Cas’ shoulder to behind his neck, fitting his thumb in front of Cas’ ear and nudging his head up until he’s making eye contact again.

“Listen to me, this is a milk run,” Dean continues. “A really important milk run, like cereal's the only food in the house kind of milk run, but it should be fine. You’ll be fine.”

“I’m sorry, Dean, I don’t know—I don’t know why I’m—why I can’t—”

Cas squeezes his eyes shut and shudders, his breaths coming out hard and ragged. Dean’s instincts kick in, and he remembers what he used to do whenever Sam got upset when they were little. He tightens his grip around Cas’ neck and presses their foreheads together, holding him steady and taking deep breaths in and out until Cas’ breathing falls in line with his.

Several seconds pass. Dean waits until calm fills the entire garage, and then he lets Cas go.

Cas blinks, looks confused, then he smiles softly at Dean. “Thank you,” he says. “How did you do that?”

Dean waves him off and walks over to the car. “Something I used to do with Sammy when we were kids.”

Once Cas is in the car, Dean leans over the open door and says, “OK, well. I’ll see you soon, Cas.”

Cas solemnly nods at him. Dean watches him closely until he pulls out of the garage, then Dean walks outside and watches until the car disappears around a curve. 

Back inside, Dean once again hears conversation flowing in the library, so he decides to take a break in his room, listen to some music alone for a few minutes.

He barely even hits play on some soft rock when there’s a knock on his door followed by Sam walking right in.

“Hey,” Sam says.

“Hey.”

“Cas head out?”

“Yeah, I, uh,” Dean says. “I let him borrow a car.”

“I hope he’s ready for it, I mean, he hasn’t left the bunker since…”

Dean rubs his eyes. “Yeah, it’s been weird here with the kid. Cas just needed some time to, uh, get better and get back in the game, but I think he’ll be OK. I told him to come right back if anything goes sideways.”

“Good. That’s good.” Sam nods and looks to the side, lost in thought. “Dean, you and Cas...You guys raised a kid. In, like, a week. I can’t—I can’t square it, how she could be spreading this disease through this city and then, you know, so sweet and curious and smart and—I just, has she done _anything?_ Anything to show that she’s dangerous?”

“No,” Dean says without hesitating. He pushes down the memory of the decapitated demons. “It’s weird, everything she does is like a regular kid except she’s just stuck in fast-forward. I think she learns from us, though, man. I mean, obviously things like reading and writing, we’re teaching her that, but other stuff, too. She’s starting to sound like Cas. And then—there was a day, we were outside, and she, uh, said that she loved me. She doesn’t know what death is, but she knows love? How the hell did she learn that?”

“Whoa, whoa, she told you that?” Sam asks. “You said you watched some TV with her, maybe she learned it from that?”

“Or maybe she…” Dean drifts off, remembers how clearly Amara had said “Castiel” when Dean asked her where she learned love. “Maybe she just really does love me.”

Sam sighs. “Dean. You know she’s not—”

“She is, though, Sam. She _is_ my kid.”

Sam lets that hang in the air for a long time. Then, “When the time comes, I guess it’ll be up to me.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Dean avoids eye contact. “I don’t think Cas or I could do it.”

“Alright, uh, I’ll look into the lore, see what I can find out. Let me know if Cas calls with any info.”

“Yeah, sure.”

After Sam leaves, Dean considers texting Cas and telling him to give Sam updates, but then he admits to himself that he likes being the middleman so all he ends up texting Cas is, _“You doing OK so far?”_ even though he just left 20 minutes ago.

Cas doesn’t text back right away, so Dean turns his music up and closes his eyes. After a couple minutes, Charlie knocks on the door and Dean pats the bed next to him. She slides on top of the covers and wraps an arm across his stomach and rests her head on his chest.

“Play it out loud,” she says.

He unplugs the headphones; music flows out of his shitty phone speaker. Charlie taps her fingers against his side. 

“I missed you so much,” Dean whispers.

“I know,” she replies.

They listen to music together for about an hour. Dean remains still save for the tapping of the beat with his fingertips against Charlie’s back. The steady rise and fall of his chest, the feel of his own heartbeat beneath the weight of Charlie’s head, her gentle humming: it’s enough. It’s all enough. He's able to accept the stillness.

Sam texts Dean to let him know that he and Amara are making lunch. Dean texts back that he and Charlie will be out in a minute, then he says to Charlie, “What are you gonna do now that you’re back?”

“Well, um, could I crash here for a while?” she asks, a bit of awkwardness in her tone. “I need to create a new identity for myself and try to get a job, then I could move out. I might stay close by, though, because I’d like to be able to go on hunts with you guys. I mean, you are still, uh, hunting, aren’t you?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah. I’ve just been here with the kid, you know, getting better after losing the Mark, but I think I’m about ready to get back at it.” He pauses and nods, reassuring himself. “It’s been nice, actually. Almost like taking a break.”

“Cas was kind of sick, too, wasn’t he? So you guys have been recovering together and raising Amara? Together?”

“Yeah, I guess. Like I said, it was nice.” He almost brings up what he overheard earlier, and maybe a better version of him would be fine teasing Charlie for talking to Cas about how mean he can be, but he’s not a better version of himself, he doesn't really know how to talk about his relationship with Cas, and so he doesn’t say anything else.

Charlie says, “I don’t really get what Amara is, and I know she’s probably very dangerous, but I’m so glad she brought me back. I really, _really_ didn’t want to be dead.”

Dean squeezes her so tight that she says “ouch.” 

At lunch, Dean declines Sam’s offer of a BLT and just eats a slice of leftover pizza instead. He sits next to Amara at the kitchen table and helps her with a math worksheet he printed for her.

“Is that all you’re gonna eat?” Sam asks when he notices the crust of a single slice of pizza on Dean’s plate.

Dean keeps looking at the math. “Yeah.”

“OK, so, who are you and what have you done with my brother?”

Amara looks up at Sam with a deadly serious expression. “No, this is Dean.” 

“I’m just not hungry, Sam, it ain’t a big deal.”

Sam sets his lips into a hard line, but he doesn’t say anything. Dean knows, actually, that it _is_ a big deal, that whatever is happening to his body is definitely a big deal, but he’s going to control what he can control. He reasons that if he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t have splitting-headache visions of Amara. If he doesn’t eat much, he doesn’t puke. Simple.

Cas texts Dean back.

_“Still driving. I still feel somewhat unsteady, but I can manage.”_

Dean responds right away, _“You’ll be OK. Call if you need anything.”_

As soon as he pockets his phone, he catches Charlie looking at him and smiling. She quickly turns away.

Three days pass. 

Sam does research and stays in close contact with everybody left in charge of controlling the infection. Amara continues to grow and begins to learn on her own, spending more time in her room reading books. Dean and Charlie do some online shopping and order enough furniture to make three new guest rooms, and they watch a bunch of shitty movies together, and they play video games—or, Charlie plays video games and explains what’s going on while Dean watches. Cas calls to check in every day, except on day three.

On day three, Dean obsessively checks his phone all day even though he knows Cas isn’t calling or texting. It’s nearly midnight when the bunker door opens and Cas descends down the steps, looking pissed off. Sam, Dean and Charlie are hanging out at the war room table when Cas pulls the demon tablet out of his coat and drops it unceremoniously on the table.

“Metatron is very fucking annoying,” he says.

“Well, Cas, glad to see you, too,” Dean says sarcastically. 

“Where is he?” Sam asks.

Cas drops into a chair next to Dean and puts his face in his hand. “He’s barely making it in a one-bedroom apartment a few hours from here. He’s human, and a pitiable one at that.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, you let him go?” Dean asks, feeling anger rise in his chest like he hasn’t felt since losing the Mark.

“Yes,” Cas says, deliberately raising his eyebrows at Dean and setting his jaw. “I let him go. I got the demon tablet, and I got vital information. There wasn’t much more to be gained from—”

“You let him go because he’s annoying,” Dean interrupts, his temper close to flaring. “You couldn’t stand the thought of driving back here with him riding shotgun. For fuck’s sake, Cas!”

Charlie tries to placate Dean by putting a hand on his forearm; it just makes him madder. He petulantly moves his arm away from her.

“Dean,” Cas says, beyond annoyed. “He is human, not a threat to us, and I got the information we needed. What more do you want from me?”

“I want you to not let—”

“What was the intel, Cas?” Sam says, unbothered. 

Cas turns his attention to Sam. “Amara is God’s sister.”

_"What?”_ Dean yells. 

“It makes sense, actually,” Cas says tiredly, looking at the table now and clearly trying to avoid Dean's gaze. “It’s rumored that God can’t be alone—the concept of the Holy Trinity comes from this theory. If God can’t be alone, then someone else must’ve been there with him at the beginning of all things. According to Metatron, God locked Amara away before the universe began, but it’s unclear why.”

Sam tries to respond, but Dean forcibly cuts him off. "Great," he spits. "Let’s just call up God and ask him what the fuck we’re supposed to do here. Metatron didn’t say anything else? That was it?”

Cas nods. He still doesn't look at Dean. 

Dean wants him to look at him so badly that he can feel his blood boil, like Cas is purposely baiting him into his anger. “Well, great, and we definitely know he wasn’t lying, and it wouldn’t have been worth it to, I don’t know, bring him here and try to get more—”

“Through what, Dean? Torture?” Cas asks, his voice rising just slightly. “I already made him bleed for that information, and I believed him when he said it was all he—”

“Yeah, sure, believe the guy who _killed me!”_ Dean yells. He gets up and starts walking away as he says, “Have pity on the guy who fucking murdered me, yeah, real smart move there, Cas!” 

He stalks down the hall, anger set into every line of his body. He resents Cas when he leaves, and he resents him when he comes back, and he resents him for being exactly who Dean needs him to be and then turning around and disappointing him. He knows his anger is unjustified, uncalled for, and that fact only infuriates him further. 

Just as Dean is going into his bedroom, Amara pops out of her room rubbing sleep from her eyes. She looks up at him, blinking awake in confusion.

“I heard yelling,” she says. Then, because she’s only a couple weeks old, and she’s spent her entire short life bringing out the best in Dean, she says the impossible: “You never yell.”

Dean releases the anger in an instant. 


	5. Chapter 5

In purgatory, Castiel knew exactly where Dean was at all times.

Castiel’s brain was still somewhat rattled when he and Dean landed in that forest, and it was the loneliness, the constant string of Dean’s prayers filling his head that sorted him out properly. He could see Dean in his mind’s eye, killing everything that came at him, staying awake for two days straight before exhaustion made him agreeable to an alliance with Benny. Dean slept while Benny sat nearby. Castiel watched Dean so closely that he failed to properly protect himself. On a daily basis, he was stabbed, bitten, beaten up, and even once he was nearly decapitated. He didn’t use his grace for frivolous distractions like hygiene, keeping his clothes clean, shaving—he needed the bulk of his attention to be on Dean so he could fly to him in a split second. 

Of course, he never had to. Dean found him instead.

In hindsight, Castiel knew that he was in love with Dean then. At the time, it did not even cross his mind to question why he was willing to risk his own life just to keep a mental eye on Dean at all times. It was his purpose. It was what he was meant to do.

He had to do it. He had to be useful to Dean, even when Dean didn’t know. 

* * *

Nobody comes to Dean’s room that night. In the morning, he opens his door at almost the exact same time Cas opens the guest room door. They look at each other for a moment.

“You still need sleep, hm?” Dean asks. “You stay with Charlie?”

“Yes,” Cas replies.

Neither of them move.

Dean says, “New furniture should be coming in any day now, we’ll be able to set up a few more guest rooms. You can have your pick.”

Cas raises his eyebrows in that way of his that makes him look menacing and annoyed. “Like a permanent room?”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Yes, Cas, like a permanent room. One that’s yours. One you can lock yourself in when you’re pissed at me.”

Cas steps toward Dean and points between them. _“Me_ pissed at _you?_ I’m sorry, am I forgetting who stormed out last night?”

“You know, you could’ve just said sorry.”

“Yes, because that’s worked so well for me in the past. Thank you, Dean, what a wonderful idea.”

Dean takes a big step forward and ducks his head down so they’re eye level. “I’m happy for you, Cas. You were able to leave the bunker and were just fine on your own for three days, wow! So now you can just fuck off whenever you want, can’t you? Go ahead and take the car, too, the one I fixed up for you!” Dean feels like he’s about to explode, and he can’t stop. “You need me to walk you out again, hold your face in my hands and comfort you until you’re man enough to fucking leave? Is that what you need from me, Cas?”

Cas looks at him with a hard expression. Their faces are only an inch from each other. Cas’ eyes flicker down to Dean’s mouth and then back up. 

Sam clears his throat.

Dean blinks and snaps out of it, backing away from Cas as he sees Charlie standing by her room, Amara by hers. Sam speaks from behind him. 

“Dean, why don’t you, uh, come with me on a supply run this morning? I think you’ve been cooped up in this bunker for too long.”

Dean and Cas go back to staring at each other. It takes Sam physically putting a hand to Dean’s shoulder to get him away from Cas. 

Sam drives. They go through a drive-through; Dean only orders black coffee. When they’re about 10 minutes from the store, Sam finally speaks.

“You know, one of these times you’re gonna push him away and he’s not gonna come back.”

Dean looks out the passenger window and drinks his coffee.

“Look, Dean, I’m not gonna pretend to understand you and Cas’ relationship, other than to say I know it’s, uh, difficult sometimes, but I just don’t get it when you can be so good, good enough to raise a _kid_ together, and then, just, everything implodes like that.”

“You’re right, Sam. You don’t get it,” is all Dean says. 

What he doesn’t say is that he doesn’t get it, either. He wants to be normal around Cas. He would never explode at his other friends the way he explodes at Cas—like he and Cas are family, like he can treat him differently because he’s on nearly the same level as Sam. The intensity of the emotions he has for Cas is an intensity he only thought possible with his own flesh and blood. He hates it.

“Can you at least try to work your shit out when we get home?” Sam continues. “For the sake of, I don’t know, everyone who has to live there?”

Dean keeps looking out the passenger window. He finishes his coffee. “The information Cas got is useless. So Amara is God’s sister, so what? All that means is that we have no idea what to do with her, and we already knew that.”

Sam sighs. “So you only get along with Cas when he’s useful, is that it?”

Dean turns to Sam with his jaw set and glares at him, but Sam just keeps looking at the road. 

“I’ve been having visions,” Sam says apropos of nothing.

“What?”

“Since I got infected, I’ve been, um, praying. And then I started having visions.”

“And you waited until now to tell me this because…?”

“Because they don’t make any sense,” Sam answers. “I thought they were nothing at first, but, I don’t know. I’m starting to think they’re not nothing.”

“Alright, you mind sharing with the class or you wanna keep being cryptic?”

“Well, I see, um, visions of Dad. Of him young, like, when we were _really_ little. But I don’t think it was really Dad, just someone pretending to be Dad.”

“What makes you say that?” Dean asks, still staring at Sam’s profile.

“For starters, he told me everything I wanted to hear.”

“Yeah, that doesn’t sound like Dad.”

Sam huffs a laugh. “No. But their message, um, it was about Amara. Or, I guess, about the Darkness. They said we’re the only ones who can stop it.”

Dean rolls his eyes. “Stop what? A fifth grader starting the next apocalypse? Yeah, I’m real worried about that.”

“Yeah, ‘cause that would be unheard of, right?” Sam says sarcastically. “Wait, what am I forgetting? Oh right, Lilith.”

“That was different. Amara, she—Sam, I don’t know. You know if she goes—if she goes dark side, you know I’ll be useless. You sure the visions said ‘we’? We like you _and_ me?”

“Yeah.” Sam pulls into a shopping center and parks the car. He unbuckles his seatbelt and turns his whole body toward Dean. “Look, I’m glad you’re being honest with me about...you know, about the fact that you can’t be objective about Amara. Actually, you were pretty honest about it from the start, so.” Sam shakes his head like he’s impressed. “But Dean, don’t you think she could be, um, doing something to you? Making you incapable of killing her would be a pretty sweet deal for her.”

Dean scrubs a hand down his face. “Cas actually thinks that might be the case. He said he could feel, uh, something deep inside me that’s connected to Amara. He couldn’t figure out what it was, though.”

“He could feel it? Was that when he was helping you, and you fell aslee—”

“Yeah," Dean quickly interrupts. "Since the Mark, and Amara showing up, I don’t know. I’ve needed Cas’ help lately. He’s been rooting around in my brain to try to sort some things out.” Dean internally curses at himself. He knows he’s just being open with Sam because Sam complimented him for being honest. 

“So, is he? Helping?”

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

They’re still sitting in the car. Dean puts his hand on the door handle, anxious to get out.

“So why are you so pissed at him?” Sam asks.

“I don’t know, Sam," he snaps. "I don’t fucking know.”

Sam’s shoulders lift with a long-suffering sigh. “Can you suck it up and apologize to him when we get back? Please?”

“He had Metatron, and he—”

“Who cares, Dean? Who cares. He said Metatron’s human and only a few hours away. If we really needed him, we could go get him ourselves. That’s not why you’re mad, and you know it. So suck it up and say sorry when we get home.”

Sam doesn’t give Dean the chance to respond. He gets out of the car and starts walking toward the store without even checking to see if Dean follows. Dean slams a hand against the dashboard for good measure, then he gets out and stalks through the parking lot to catch up. 

And that’s when he sees the same woman he hit with his car the last time he was here. 

“A fucking Walmart ghost, fantastic,” he mumbles to himself as he veers off course to approach her. 

“Hey,” he shouts when he’s just a few feet away.

She turns and looks up at him with empty eyes. Completely white eyes, like Pamela’s fake ones after Cas burned hers out. Or like Lilith's. 

“You’ve gotten too close,” she says in that eerie, high-pitched voice. “Far too close.”

“Yeah, you think?” Dean answers, keeping his distance. “Who the fuck are you? Why are you haunting this parking lot?”

“Dean?” Sam’s voice calls, and then suddenly he’s right there. “Dean, who are you talking to?” he asks, concerned.

Dean turns slowly toward Sam and looks up at him. He then turns back toward the woman, but she’s gone. “I,” he starts. “I, um. Fuck.”

 _“What,_ Dean?”

“I think I’m seeing a ghost.”

“Alright, well, it’s not like that’s something we can’t handle. C’mon,” Sam says, pulling on Dean’s sleeve to get him to move. 

Dean gets sick in the store and has to literally run to the bathroom. Sam won’t shut up about it on the way home.

“You’ve been sick since we got rid of the Mark?” he asks as he speeds down the interstate. 

“I guess,” Dean mumbles.

“Dean. Jesus Christ. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Dean resists the childish urge to remind Sam of all the things he _did_ tell him, all the stuff he didn’t keep secret. Instead he says, “It didn’t seem like a big deal. Although now I’m wondering if it’s some kind of ghost sickness.”

“What if it’s Amara?”

“She said it’s not her.”

Sam shakes his head. “If trusting Amara gets you killed, I’m gonna be really pissed at you.”

“Hey, how ‘bout you do some research when we get home, see if you can find anything about the Mark of Cain or ghost sickness or anything that might explain why I can’t stop ralphing? That’ll make you feel like you’re doing something about it, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Sam says sadly. “I’m having visions, and you’re seeing ghosts. We’re losing it.”

“Yeah, definitely not our finest fucking hour.”

A beat passes. Then Sam says, “Apologize to Cas when we get home.”

“Yeah, OK.”

Amara gets to Dean first. She is, as usual, impossibly bigger. Dean hands her a bag of new clothes when he sees her in the hallway, and she presses her hand to his arm and gestures for him to follow her into her room. 

“Dean, I’m beginning to feel as if something is off,” Amara says as she starts changing her clothes.

Dean turns around quickly—sure, he was just changing her diapers a week or so ago, but she’s old enough to need privacy now. With his back to her, he asks, “Uh, what do you think it is?”

“I started to feel it when you yelled at Castiel. Something is calling to me, I think. My whole life has been within these walls, and I’m only now starting to realize there’s more out there past the trees across the street.” When she’s done, she walks around in front of Dean and looks up at him. “What should I do?”

Dean sighs and sits down on the edge of her bed, then he takes her hand and pulls her over until she sits next to him. He angles toward her and says, “Sweetheart, you’ve been alive less than a month. We have no idea why you’re growing so fast, and we don’t know what you’re capable of doing. I’m sorry we’ve kept you here while you’re growing, but you know you’re, uh, different, right?”

“Well, I’m very old, I know,” she replies easily. “But everything is dark. My memory, I mean. I was, I guess, asleep, and now I am awake. I know it was you who woke me up, and I know you and I are bonded in a way that can never be broken, but that’s all I know.”

Dean blinks. “We’re, uh, bonded? You mean because I’ve raised you?”

Her eyebrows knit together. She puts her hand on Dean’s cheek. “Yes. And you’ve shared this Mark.” She points to her shoulder. “There’s no separating you and me.”

Dean reaches up and takes her hand, moving it away from his face but keeping a hold on it. “What, um, do you think is calling to you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t like the yelling, though. It upsets me, and confuses me.” She looks away, clearly lost in thought. “I want things to be simple, but they aren’t simple, are they? I thought things were as simple as you love Castiel, and Castiel loves you, and you both have taken care of me for the majority of my life and taught me how to love. But things aren’t that simple.”

Dean’s heart drops like a stone into the pit of his stomach. “I'm sorry we were yelling. I’ll, uh, talk to Cas. Sort things out.”

“I think that would be good.”

Dean gets up, but he pauses in her doorway and puts his fist against the frame. “Did you talk to Cas about this stuff, too, sweetheart?”

“No,” she says sweetly. “Just you.”

Dean nods and leaves, his brain a jumble of thoughts as he tries to parse out what the fuck he’s supposed to do. He passes Charlie in the hall, and she points toward the library without saying anything. 

Cas is sitting in an armchair in the corner of the library, wearing his usual outfit, but with only socks on his feet so he can pull his knees up almost to his chest. He’s reading a book.

Dean goes to the table, on the side closer to Cas, and pulls out a chair and sits in it so he’s facing him. Cas doesn’t look up from his book.

“I’m sorry,” Dean says.

Cas doesn’t look up.

“I shouldn’t’ve, uh, thrown it in your face that you needed help leaving the bunker,” Dean continues in a small voice. “And it’s not fair of me to be mad about Metatron. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, Dean.” He’s still looking at his book.

“Am I, um, forgiven?”

Cas doesn’t answer. 

Dean taps his fingertips against the table. “Alright, well. I’m just gonna…”

On his way out of the library, Dean has to clench his fists to stop himself from turning around and yelling at Cas again. He goes down to the shooting range and controls his rage through target practice. 

Charlie finds him after about half an hour. She’s pretty good at shooting a gun, but she lets him baby her anyway. It makes him feel better.

Afterward, they go to the armory and clean some weapons. Charlie talks, clearly trying to cheer Dean up, and he listens. At some point, though, he must zone out, because she asks him a question and he doesn’t answer. 

“Dean?” she asks.

“Hmm?”

“Did you hear me?”

“What? No. Sorry, what’d you ask?”

Charlie looks at him a little awkwardly. “Well, I just spent, like, 20 minutes telling you about the girlfriends I had before I died, so I was asking you if you wanted to maybe talk about any girlfriends you had before any of the times you died. You know, just to balance the conversation out a little bit.”

Dean’s first instinct is to shut down, but it’s Charlie, and he’s never been able to shut down in front of Charlie. 

So instead, he tells her about Cassie. He tells her what he’s never told anyone, which is that he still checks up on her sometimes. He hasn’t seen her in a decade, but they talk on the phone every once in a while. She has a husband and no kids, and they travel around the world together for their work.

Then he tells her about Lisa, about the guilt that he carries for what he did to her, and when he drops his head into his hand and starts to cry he expects Charlie’s small arms to encompass him and make everything better.

But she doesn’t. And when Dean, confused, blinks up at her with tears in his eyes, she gives him a cold glare.

“That’s really fucked up, Dean,” she says.

And then she leaves the room, and Dean is left alone to grapple with the reality that Amara may have brought Charlie back for Dean, but Charlie does not exist to serve him.

He cleans guns until his fingers ache. 

When he gets back upstairs, he passes Cas in the hallway, but Cas avoids eye contact and doesn’t say anything. The rage bubbles back up, but Dean stamps it down. He goes to the library and finds Sam with his laptop open and books strewn all over the table. Dean walks up behind Sam’s chair and puts his hand on the table next to him, leaning over him so he can look at the computer screen.

“What is this?” Dean asks.

“Uh, I’m basically doing contact tracing for the infection,” Sam replies. “I think we got it under control, but just in case—”

“Whoa, whoa, scroll back up,” Dean says, moving his hand in a scrolling motion. 

Sam moves the screen back up to a set of pictures. Dean points at one on the right side.

“Who is that?” he asks.

Sam clicks around and answers, “That was, I guess, the first person around here to die from the infection. Her name was Caroline Anders, 34 years old.”

Dean blinks and stares at the picture. “That’s the woman I keep seeing. The Walmart ghost.”

A searing headache immediately shoots through Dean’s temples, forcing him to squeeze his eyes shut and keel over. Sam is at his side, practically shouting his name and trying to hold him up, but Dean keeps crumpling to the floor as the pain takes over.

He manages a weak, “Cas. Get Cas. Please.”

He sees the woman at first, how he saw her in the parking lot, how she looked when he hit her with the Impala, but then the image shifts and the woman is grinning at Dean and her face twists and morphs until she has Amara’s face. Dean knows he's screaming, because he knows what’s coming and he wants to stop it, but it comes anyway. He watches as Amara’s eyelids peel back, her eyes bulge out of their sockets, her skin below her eyes drags down her cheeks until she is merely muscle and bone.

Something snaps in Dean. Memories flood back to him, memories he keeps deep in the recesses of his brain in hopes of never having them surface. The way Amara’s face distorts in his visions is the way he used to torture souls in hell. She is the face of every victim he had on the rack. 

Dean passes out.

When he wakes up, his head is still pulsing but not unpleasantly so. He’s lying on his side in his bed, and Cas’ face is right in front of him, both of his hands hovering around Dean’s head but not quite touching. He’s kneeling next to the bed with a look of intense concentration, but it wavers once he sees that Dean is awake.

“Dean,” Cas says gently. “How do you feel?”

Dean tries to move and winces. He manages to reach up and grab one of Cas’ hands, pulling it toward him until Cas’ fingers touch his forehead. Cas gets the hint and presses his fingertips purposely against his skin.

“I feel like shit, Cas.”

“Your brain feels better now,” Cas says. A beat of silence passes, then, “Sam said you called for me.”

“Yeah.”

Another beat. “Why didn’t you call for Amara? She would’ve been, uh, able to do more.”

Dean’s eyes slip shut. He leans into Cas’ touch. “Didn’t want Amara. Wanted you.”

“Hmm. Were you drinking?”

“No.”

“Sam said you’re seeing a ghost.”

Dean sighs. “I don’t think she’s real. I think I’m just losing my mind, need to get out of here and kill—do something.”

Cas moves his fingers away from Dean, but they drag a bit across his skin before they’re gone. Cas tilts his head to the side. “Do you still feel a need to kill, like you did with the Mark of Cain?”

“I don’t know, maybe.” Dean struggles into a sitting position and swings his legs over the side of the bed, making Cas get to his feet and take a step back. “How ‘bout we just take Amara out for a little bit? She was telling me—she needs to see more of the world.”

“You and me? You want me to go with you?” Cas asks with a cold edge to his tone.

“Yes, Cas. You gonna stay mad at me forever?”

“I’m not mad at you, Dean.” He walks toward the door. “I’m going to go talk to Amara.”

“Cas,” Dean calls.

Cas stops and turns, his eyebrows knit together.

Dean says, “When you look inside my brain, can you see what I see?”

“Probably not the way you see it.”

Dean nods and looks down at his hands. “I think I’m seeing hell. Memories of when I was…”

“Yes, that makes sense. I was wondering why it felt familiar to me.” Cas walks back into the room and looks down at Dean. “Whatever is going on with you, it’s tapping into the most painful parts of your life. It’s trying to hurt you as deeply as possible.”

“Great.”

“I’ll do what I can to help, Dean, but you may need something more powerful. However, I, um, don’t know if I trust Amara to help you.”

“Because you still think she might be the one causing it?” Dean asks skeptically.

“I don’t know what I think, but one of us has to remain somewhat unbiased.” Cas moves toward the door again. “I’m going to find Amara,” he repeats.

Dean remains on his bed for a few more minutes, waiting for his head to stop swimming. He’s not exactly sure what Cas meant about Dean’s memories of hell being familiar, because he and Cas never talk about hell. Dean has never asked Cas what it was like rescuing him—how exactly he did it—because the idea of having that conversation with Cas horrifies him. He’s afraid that he'll say it was the most important thing he had ever done, and that saving Dean changed his life completely. But he’s also afraid that Cas will say it was just another mission, that it meant nothing to him. Both options would be impossible for Dean to handle. 

They take Amara in the Impala, and Cas insists on sitting in the back with her. They sit in silence for the first few minutes of the drive as the road stretches endlessly ahead of them. Tension builds in Dean; he feels like someone should be saying something, anything, but nobody does.

Nearly an hour passes before Amara says, “Stop here.”

Her voice shocks Dean into action, making him immediately obey her command even though they’re in the middle of nowhere with just a sparse forest on the side of the road.

Amara doesn’t say anything as she gets out of the car and walks straight into the trees. Dean and Cas are slower to leave the car. They just stand together and watch as Amara gets farther away.

“Should we, uh, follow her?” Dean asks.

“I don’t know,” Cas answers.

They don’t have to make a decision, because Amara reappears after just a minute, walking back toward them with her face set in anger. She looks bigger, slightly older.

“Something is wrong here,” she says.

“Well, sweetheart, what do you—”

Dean is cut off by Amara kneeling down and jamming her hand straight into the ground all the way up to her shoulder. She yanks and pulls up, and out of the soil comes a tree, growing before their eyes until it towers over them and spreads at the top into branches and leaves. 

Dean and Cas share a look, trying to decide what to do, and in the moment of their hesitation, Amara pulls out a dozen more trees, two dozen, three dozen, and so on.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Amara, slow down,” Dean says, going to her and reaching for her shoulders to get her to stop.

She puts a hand out and stops him in his tracks. “I see things now. This is what’s calling to me. My brother has let this world die,” she says, her voice imbued with rage. “I’m going to fix it. I can fix it. I can fix it.”

Dean keeps trying to get through to her, but Amara continues tending to the ground, bringing up life and vegetation in such a mesmerizing display that Dean falls into a kind of trance as he watches beauty and nature come to life before his eyes. He falls to one knee and sinks into the ground. 

He forgets everything.

His body and mind go lax. He feels grass growing under him and vines growing over him, and he is sure that he is about to be buried in the earth forever, and he doesn’t care. He’s being consumed by darkness, and he doesn’t care.

He doesn’t care until he feels something other than himself, something that is a part of him, and it’s being subsumed into the earth, too, but it’s wrong. It’s wrong, and he has to stop it. He can feel it like a limb being cut off from his body. He comes back to himself and crawls his way out of the earth, and as soon as he can feel air on his skin, Cas’ hand reaches down and pulls him up to his feet.

“Dean!” Cas shouts. “Are you OK? Amara is...she’s doing something...what should we…”

Dean ignores Cas. He walks straight toward his hurt limb. The Impala is nearly completely invisible under invasive vegetation, and Dean pushes down the panic rising in him in favor of tearing at the vines, throwing away the dirt until he reaches his car. The second he touches the handle, more vines crawl out and try to swallow her again. 

“Amara,” Dean says with a fatherly power in his voice that he didn’t know he was capable of. “Amara, stop right this instant. Stop.”

The vines around Dean’s hand shrivel and fall. 

Amara appears at the edge of her overgrown forest, shadowed by her trees, just a few feet behind Cas. Her arms and face are covered in dirt, her hands clenched at her sides. She looks ancient, despite being a pre-pubescent teenager. 

“Amara. This is not OK,” Dean says, staring at her.

“You’ve kept me hidden away. You kept me from seeing that the world is dying,” she says.

Dean takes a deep breath, trying to find his patience. “It’s not dying _today_ just because there aren’t enough trees around here. For fuck’s sake, Amara, of course the world is dying. It’s not some perfect fucking paradise, bad things happen all the time in every conceivable way, so what? What? You think you can grow a bunch of trees and bury everyone in the earth and then everything will be perfect? What the hell did you find in those woods?”

“I wanted paradise. I wanted bliss. My brother locked me away because he wanted people to have _free will?_ Free will means death and destruction and chaos and pain.” She crouches down and puts her hands to the earth once more. “I can fix it.” 

The ground shakes beneath Dean’s feet, the road crumbling as grass and flowers crack it apart and grow in the crevices. Dean and Cas look at each other, then they both move toward Amara, Dean on her right and Cas on her left, and they haul her up from the earth by her shoulders and carry her screaming to the car. She fights them, but in the way a regular teenage girl would fight them. She’s not actually trying to hurt them. 

While Dean holds Amara in a bear hug, Cas uses his grace to clear enough of the greenery away from the Impala so they can get inside. Amara repeats over and over again that she can fix it, but she lets Dean hand her off to Cas so he can keep a hold on her in the backseat while Dean drives over the broken road and back toward the bunker. 

“Can you put her to sleep or something?” Dean shouts over Amara’s continued _I can fix it, I can fix it, I can fix it._

“She’s too strong. I’m using every bit of energy I have just to hold her,” Cas replies.

 _“You don’t trust me!”_ Amara yells in a booming voice. “I heard you talking about me! You don’t trust me! You won’t listen to me!”

The sky goes dark. Dean keeps looking straight ahead at the road, trying to ignore the way trees and vines and flowers are still growing up around them as they drive. He feels the tension again, the tension of needing to say something but being unable.

Amara continues, “I’m not the one hurting you, Dean! _You_ are hurting you! It’s always you! You torture yourself, you hate yourself, you rely on your friends and family to _believe in you_ in order to have some semblance of worth! Can you see? Can you see like I see? Your love—your love is broken, Dean. Cloaked in shame. It’s so cloaked in shame that you won’t even admit it, you won’t even say it, you won’t even tell Castiel—”

Everything stops. The new growth begins to rot and decay as Dean looks into the rearview mirror to see Amara passed out, Cas’ fingers still pressed to her forehead. Cas is breathing heavily, eyes closed, but when he opens them they flicker with bright blue light before returning to normal.

Dean and Cas look at each other through the mirror. They don’t say anything. 


End file.
